


Gabriel's Hogwarts Adventure

by JWade



Series: Gabriel's Hogwarts Adventure [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Supernatural
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-20
Updated: 2017-04-02
Packaged: 2018-10-08 03:43:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 29
Words: 44,698
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10377153
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JWade/pseuds/JWade
Summary: Gabriel decides that if the Winchester's want to stop the apocalypse so badly, they can figure out how to themselves so he deages them to eleven and sends them to the best school of magic in the universe...with a few applicable changes.





	1. Chapter 1

Gabriel watched the Winchesters leave the warehouse with a frown as he waited for the last of the holy fire to go out. Fine. They wanted another way out of it, they could find one. He was damned if he was gonna do all the work for them. He considered the matter for a moment and then smirked and snapped his fingers. 

Sam and Dean were driving down the road one moment and the next they were standing in some sort of entrance hall with a bunch of kids. It only took a moment of looking around before they realized that they were kids too and groaned. “Gabriel you think?” Sam asked annoyed. 

“Nah really?” Dean asked incredulously. 

“Come on Gabriel! This isn’t funny anymore!” Sam shouted getting strange looks from the other kids. 

Suddenly everything around them froze. Gabriel realized that he would need to tell them what they were there for if they were going to get anything out of it. “Welcome to Hogwarts,” he said with a flourish as he appeared from thin air. 

“I thought we were done with this bullshit,” Dean asked heatedly. 

“I’m done trying to get you to say yes. You want another way out. Find it. We’re in the best school of magic in any world.”

“Why don’t you just tell us what you want us to do?” Sam asked wearily. 

“Because I have no clue. As far as I’m aware it can’t be stopped. That’s why you’re here. To learn all aspects of magic and the supernatural world to find a way.”

“So we don’t get out until we find a way to stop the apocalypse?” Sam asked disbelievingly. 

“Nope. You don’t get out until you graduate. The rest is up to you,” Gabriel said with a smirk. 

“We can’t just stay here for seven years while Lucifer reeks havoc on the world!” Dean exclaimed. 

“Oh Deano. Are you forgetting how mighty and powerful I am? Already?” He chuckled. “No time will pass in the outside world. Get your education, become better hunters and maybe even find a way to stop the apocalypse, and then you go right back to the same moment you left. Study hard boys. Grades matter,” he laughed as he disappeared. 

“Damnit!” Dean cursed loudly just as the action started back up around him. 

“Language, Mr. Winchester!” he heard a stern voice behind him and turned around to see none other than Minerva McGonagal and even he couldn’t help but be cowed by the look on her face. 

“You don’t understand. We’re not supposed to be here,” he tried to reason with her. 

“Nonsense. You’re just nervous. It happens. You’ll be sorted into your house just like everyone else,” she said slightly more comforting. “However, if I hear language like that from you again it will be ten points from your house.”

“Just play along for now, Dean,” Sam whispered as he elbowed his brother. 

“Yes ma’am,” he said trying to look contrite before shooting a glare at his brother. 

Sam looked around in awe. Even though they were trapped here, he couldn’t help but think he might just have fun as they were led into the great hall. Sam gaped at the ceiling just as much as the rest of them, but didn’t fail to notice that even Dean seemed mildly impressed, despite the fact that he was still sulking. 

Despite being very much a Harry Potter nerd, he was distracted enough not to notice who all was being sorted with them until he heard, “Granger, Hermione.” His head snapped up. Were they really going to be here at the same time as Harry Potter? He wondered if Gabriel would have all the same stuff happen as in the books. That would be interesting. He and Dean would have to plan things out. If they could get their hands on the philosopher’s stone that would be awesome. It would be just like Gabriel to change the traps around and make it harder on them though. Unless he wanted them to get it for some reason. Before he was able to think himself in circles too much, he was again distracted by the call of, “Potter, Harry.” 

“Dude, please tell me we aren’t going to play out the books,” Dean whispered annoyed. 

“I don’t know. Shh. McGonagal is glaring again,” Sam whispered back. 

It felt like forever before she called, “Weasley, Ronald,” followed by, “Winchester, Dean.” 

Sam shoved his brother forward, getting another glare as he sat petulantly on the stool and the sorting hat settled over his head. It only took a moment for the hat to yell out, “Gryffindor!” and Dean stomped over to the Gryffindor table and took a seat on the very end. 

Finally, it was Sam’s turn. As soon as the hat was in place, Sam spoke in his head, ‘Put me in Gryffindor with my brother please?’

‘Whose job is it to sort students, mine or yours?’ it said rather disgruntled. ‘No no no. Gryffindor isn’t for you. You and your brother are far too codependent. A little separation would do you both good.’

‘Oh come on. Please?’ Sam begged. How was he supposed to plan things out with Dean if they were in different houses?

‘Hmm, let me think. No. Besides, while you are plenty brave, you don’t have the heart of a true Gryffindor. No. Better be… “Ravenclaw!” The hat yelled to the hall. Sam sagged sadly and got up and headed to the Ravenclaw table, sitting across the aisle from Dean so at least they could talk to each other, even if it would have to be loudly. 

Dean finally perked up when the food arrived and Sam snorted in amusement. If there was one thing that could be counted on it was Dean’s love for food. He wondered what he would do when he realized that there weren’t any cheeseburgers or pizza here. If they couldn’t find a way out, maybe he could talk Gabriel into resolving that issue. It couldn’t be hard to make a few changes here and there. In fact, if Gabriel wanted them to learn about real magic there would have to be a lot of changes anyway. What was a few more small ones. 

He and Dean managed to arrange to meet up after breakfast the next morning and find someplace private to talk before they were all shuffled off to their dorms. Sam introduced himself to his roommates, Terry Boot, Michael Corner, Steven Cornfoot, and Anthony Goldstein, and was glad to see that he had a trunk at the end of his bed with his initials. At least Gabriel was kind enough to give them what they would need. He so envied his brother right now though, getting to room with Harry Potter, Ron Weasley, and Neville Longbottom. Then he remembered about Ron’s snoring and chuckled. Maybe he didn’t envy his brother that much. 

 

Gabriel sighed with delight as he lay down on his plush bed in the Slytherin dorm. He, of course, had no intention of actually doing any work or studying here. He could just snap his fingers and get everything done. He was mostly just here for the fun. And watching the Winchesters try to bumble through and their no doubt pitiful attempts to escape this world. He knew that the only house he could have possibly fit into is Slytherin. He wasn’t particularly brave, and while he was smarter than any human in existence, including everyone in this school, even Dumbledore, he would never fit in with the geeks in Ravenclaw. Hufflepuff wasn’t even a possibility. He didn’t have a loyal bone in his body, but he was definitely sneaky and cunning. 

He knew that Sam knew the books and movies though, so an extra student that was never mentioned would make him suspicious, so he had to take the place of a student that existed in this world, and as far as Slytherin boys there weren’t many good possibilities. Draco Malfoy was just no. Way too poncy and his personality was basically the opposite of Gabriel. Crabbe and Goyle were also not an option, which left him with Blaise Zabini or Theodore Nott. He would like the chance to get close to Sam and Dean, to keep an eye on them if nothing else, so he didn’t think a Death Eater’s son would be the best route, so he picked Blaise Zabini. It had the added benefit of the fact that he was mentioned about as much as a piece of furniture so there would be no personality discrepancies to make the boys suspicious. This was gonna be fun.


	2. Chapter 2

The next morning, Sam went down in quiet conversation with Terry Boot, and was surprised to see Dean hanging out with Harry Potter and Ron Weasley, just carrying on and having a good time. After his brother’s attitude last night, he figured he’d be standoffish for weeks at least if they didn’t find a way out of here. The more Sam thought about it though, he didn’t know if he wanted to find a way out. If no time was passing in the real world and they were really going to get a real supernatural education, it seemed like a good deal to him. The fact that it would be fun was just a bonus. Sure being eleven again sucked, but no situation was perfect. On top of all that, they got three square meals a day and comfortable beds every night, rather than cheap diner food and dirty motels. Sam grinned as he wondered if house elves existed in this universe. He might just have to find his way to the kitchens and find out.   
He was in for a shock when he got his schedule. He knew there would have to be changes of course, but somehow he had expected the names of the classes to be the same at least, but no. Professor McGonagal taught Magical Theory and Professor Flitwick taught Spellcrafting. The rest were either the same or similar, but he noticed that he had classes that they shouldn’t have until third year electives, but he guessed that Gabriel was giving them things they needed to know. In addition to those two classes, he also had Magical Beings instead of creatures taught by Hagrid, Runes taught by Babbling, Potions with…oh god, couldn’t Gabriel have at least sacked Snape? Defense with Quirrel, Herbology with Sprout, Magical History with Binns, and Arithmancy with Vector. Plus the flying class, of course. Sam knew that you couldn’t really fly on brooms and wondered if Gabriel just threw that in for a little fun. He wondered what about Divination. He knew that it could be real, but maybe there were still some electives they could pick up in third year. He couldn’t imagine that it would take him seven years to learn how to read tea leaves and tarot cards.   
The next thing Sam looked for was who he had classes with. It looked like the only class he would share with Dean and the Gryffindors was History. At least it was a class they could talk in. He had Potions, Magical Beings, Herbology and Spellcrafting with the Hufflepuffs and Runes, Arithmancy, Defense, and Magical Theory with Slytherin. He noticed that they had less than two hours until his first class, and hoped Dean had that time free too, so headed over to the Gryffindor table and tapped Dean on the shoulder, jerking his head towards the door. They compared schedules as they walked. Sam had Defense first and Dean had Arithmancy. Sam did like that they had each class only once per week for three hours instead of twice a week for an hour and a half. It would make it easier. For him at least.   
When Sam told Dean his thoughts about maybe they should play this out, Dean groaned. “Seriously Sammy? You want to be stuck here in classrooms for seven years? What am I saying? Of course, you do.”  
“It’s not just that. We’re essentially being offered the best education possible, and you know Gabriel would make it the best, not only for free, but it won’t even take any time from our lives. We’ll go back to the same moment we left with seven years of all the magical knowledge of the universe, or at least most of it. Think of what kind of good that can do.”  
Dean sighed heavily. He knew Sam was right, but the idea of growing up and going through puberty while sitting in musty classrooms all day was not his idea of a fun time. Sam was the one with all the knowledge and doing all the research. Dean was the one who got to have fun. Not write mind-numbing essays and listen to teachers drone on and on. “Fine. We’ll stay. For now. I’ll agree to give it a chance and that’s the best you’re gonna get.”  
“Good enough,” Sam agreed. “Now we need to head back to our dorms and get our books for today’s classes. Meet up in the library after the last class gets out?”  
“Why the library?” Dean groaned again.   
“Because it quiet there and we can talk while we do our homework,” Sam said not able to resist a chuckle as Dean started banging his head against the wall at the mention of homework. 

Gabriel/Blaise, of course, fiddled around with the pairings in class so that he could either be with Sam or Dean, whichever one he was with. He also made sure that all the teachers were actually good teachers. No point in all this otherwise. So there would be no stuttering Quirrell or Boring Binns this time. Snape would still be an ass. No point in changing something so amusing, but he would actually teach.   
First year defense, rather than spells like Sam suspected, was about physical conditioning and self-defense and would transition into martial arts later in the year. Quirrell gave a quick overview of what they would be learning in later years to include weapon training. No guns, but Sam didn’t mind that. They were good with guns already. Sam was particularly looking forward to learning swords. They were paired up with a ‘workout buddy’ for the remainder of the year, and Sam found himself stuck with a Slytherin named Blaise Zabini. Sam wracked his brain to see what all he could remember about him from the books, but realized there wasn’t much. He didn’t seem to get a lot of screen time since he wasn’t a Malfoy crony. That at least boded well.   
Quirrell set them with homework to run every day, but they could take Sundays off if they wanted to, and work out with the gym machines next door. He handed out a sheet with what they should be capable of at the end of each term when they would be tested before they paired up and started learning basic self-defense techniques. Sam knew most of this already, but a little refresher never hurt and he found very quickly that Blaise seemed to be able to make it fun, no matter how repetitive it was. While he did get along with his roommates, Blaise was the first person he met that he might be able to count as a real friend, and if he was going to be stuck here for seven years it would be nice to have friends outside of his brother.   
When the class was over, he and Blaise walked together to the great hall, making plans to meet up after dinner for their workout, before splitting up to their respective tables when they got there. Sam took a quick look over the Gryffindor table to see that Dean wasn’t there yet. It wasn’t long before he showed up though, once again hanging out with Harry and Ron. It seemed that Dean was getting into this whole making friends thing too. He nodded in greeting to Sam when he came in and took his place at the Gryffindor table.   
They only had half an hour between lunch and their next class though so there wouldn’t be any time to talk to him in between. Sam shuffled his way off to Magical Theory and when he got there he saw that Blaise beat him there and waved him over to a seat. “I hear McGonagal is super strict,” Blaise said.   
Sam just turned up a corner of his mouth. He knew that the cat sitting on the desk in front of them was, in fact, said professor, so he set out to earn some brownie points and hopefully not let Blaise incriminate himself in the process. “There’s nothing wrong with strict. We just have to do what we’re supposed to do is all.”  
“True, but I also heard that she hates Slytherins. I just hope she’s fair too,” he said quietly.   
“I’m sure she will be. I mean, even if she is head of Gryffindor, she would still need to be fair to everyone,” Sam said. He did remember that in the books she was rather biased against the Slytherins, not to Snape’s degree, but maybe hearing their conversation would be enough to change that. By the end of the class, Sam’s hand was cramping from taking so many notes. This was one class that he definitely didn’t have a leg up in. He could never have imagined how complicated magic could be, and they were just scratching the surface. He could easily believe it would take him seven years to get a handle on all this. He made his way to the library to meet his brother and start working on the essay he had for homework.


	3. Chapter 3

Dean beat him to the library, which wasn’t surprising since his Runes class was on the seventh floor, just down the hall from the library. He had his head on the desk and Sam wondered for a moment if he was asleep so he crept over and then dropped his books on the table loudly. Dean jumped about ten feet in the air, but he also got a glare from Madam Pince and shot her an apologetic look as he sat down laughing. “I can already tell I’m going to hate this,” Dean grumbled. 

“Oh it’s not so bad. You have to admit the subjects are interesting,” Sam said. “At least the ones I had today were. How were yours?” 

“Arithmancy is basically just magical math and very confusing. I have a whole worksheet for homework. Runes is practically a whole different language and hard as fuck. This sucks. You’re totally tutoring me.”

Sam just shook his head. That sounded interesting enough to him. “Defense is pretty cool. We’ll be a bit ahead of the curve at least at first though. We’re learning self defense and martial arts this year, but later years we learn weapons.”

“What, like swords and stuff?” Dean perked up instantly. 

“Yep. And daggers, throwing weapons, archery, all of it,” Sam said with a grin. 

“That doesn’t sound so bad,” Dean admitted. 

“We also have to do physical conditioning for homework. We all get workout buddies and we’re supposed to run and work out every day.”

“I can live with that. What was your other class today?” Dean asked. 

“Magical Theory with McGonagal. You’ll probably hate that one,” Sam said honestly, “but I thought it was great. It’s amazing to see how magic actually works. I have an essay to write for that class and I’m meeting my friend Blaise to work out after dinner. You’re welcome to join us and get a head start if you want.”

“I don’t know. Harry and Ron said something about exploring the castle after dinner,” Dean told him. 

“That sounds like fun. They seemed like decent enough guys in the books,” Sam told him. 

“Yeah. They’re pretty cool,” Dean told him. 

“Just make sure to never rely on Ron’s notes. If he ever takes any,” Sam said with a chuckle. 

“Yeah I already figured that part out for myself,” Dean said joining in the laughter. “It’s really weird how you know all these people already. 

“Not everyone. I haven’t really met anyone I know. I mean I had classes with Malfoy, Crabbe, and Goyle, but haven’t really talked to them, not that I want to. The rest of the people I’ve met have only been mentioned occasionally in the books so it’s nice to be able to get to know them. I’ll probably screw up royally when I meet Harry, Ron, and Hermione because I know so much about them.”

“Yeah I didn’t think of it that way.” They spent the remainder of the time until dinner working on their homework and chatting away. 

After dinner, Sam and Blaise met up in the hallway. “So you wanna run on the track in the room or outside around the lake while we still have a little light left?”

“Lake. Definitely. I’m sure we’ll get sick enough of the room this winter,” Sam replied. They walked out to the lake and when Sam realized just how big it was, he decided one lap would do for today. “Race you around?” he asked challengingly. 

Blaise grinned and said, “You’re on,” and took off running. 

“Hey I wasn’t ready yet!” Sam said rushing after him. 

“You snooze you lose, Sammykins,” Blaise called back with a laugh. He knew he couldn’t run full out the whole time. It would be too suspicious. He could technically run forever and never get winded, but he was supposed to be a human child here, so he would get tired eventually. He gradually slowed down and Sam caught up, but didn’t really pull ahead. He figured they would be going for that last burst of speed at the end to decide the winner, and so they did. Blaise won, barely. He had to admit, Sam was pretty fast. 

Next, they headed to the gym and Blaise thought to bring his list so he knew where they had to be by the end of the term and on which machines. They spent the time chatting and laughing as they finished their workout, but Sam wasn’t feeling so well by the end. “I think working out after that big dinner might be a bad idea. Maybe we should switch to in the mornings?” he asked hoping that Blaise was an early bird. 

“You mean before or after breakfast?” he asked. 

“Before preferably, but after works too, as long as we get down early for breakfast, we should have time before classes start.”

“I like before. I’m always up super early anyway,” Blaise told him. Technically, as an archangel he didn’t need to sleep anyway, so it hardly mattered to him. Not that he could tell Sam that, of course. 

“Okay, so 6am tomorrow?” he asked after looking at his watch and noticing that they had been at it for almost two hours.

“Perfect. It’s almost curfew though so we should head back to the dorms,” Blaise suggested. 

“Right. See you in the morning,” Sam said cheerfully as he peeled off towards Ravenclaw tower. 

The next morning, Sam realized that Blaise wasn’t kidding about being an early bird. Even Sam wasn’t as chipper as the Slytherin was that early in the morning, and damn if Sam wouldn’t kill for a coffee. He was definitely going to try and pray to Gabriel today and do something about the food and drink offerings here. 

After breakfast, Sam went to hang out with Dean, and got his first introduction to Harry and Ron, and did his best not to fanboy over them. The fact that Harry was probably used to it just made him more determined not to. He also managed to make it through the morning without dropping any information he shouldn’t know. He could definitely see why Dean would gravitate to them. He was pretty much right in the middle of their personalities. He loved food and hated class like Ron, but he was actually more intelligent and kind like Harry. 

When time came to head to class, Sam felt a pit forming in his stomach. He was not looking forward to potions at all. At least he was a Ravenclaw, though. If there was one house, other than Slytherin, that Snape could stand it was Ravenclaw. Sam found himself paired off with a Hufflepuff, Susan Bones, and they managed to make it through with a pretty decent potion. Snape really was an acerbic bastard, but at least he actually taught, spending the first hour going over the ingredients, reactions, and preparation methods before setting them to make the potion for the last two hours. 

He was back with the Slytherins in Runes and got there before Blaise did, so saved him a seat. The dark-haired boy bounded in just a few minutes before the class was set to start and cheerfully accepted the offered seat. “So I got paired with your brother in Magical Beings this morning,” he said conversationally. 

“Oh yeah? What’d you do?”

“I guess Hagrid is starting us small. We learned about ghosts today. He even had a couple of the house ghosts come talk to us. Nearly Headless Nick and The Fat Friar,” Blaise told him. 

“Did you talk about any of the…um…bad ghosts?” Sam asked. 

“They were mentioned, how a lot of them go mad and get vicious and all, but we’re supposed to go more into detail on that next week.”

Professor Babbling chose that moment to come in, so they shut their mouths and opened their books. One change Sam was glad of was that instead of parchment and quills, they used good old fashioned notebooks. Once again, Sam’s hand was cramping by the end from the amount of notes he was taking. He could see why Dean hated it, but he found it fascinating. 

Gabriel had decided that Blaise could pull ahead of Sam in one or two subjects without being suspicious, and given his connection to runes and sigils from both heaven and the pagans it would be too hard for this not to be one of them, so he didn’t worry so much about hiding his knowledge in this class. 

“You seem to be pretty good at runes,” Sam observed as they left the class. 

“Yeah. My dad uses runes a lot for his work, so I’ve picked up a bit and I kinda have a knack for it. Runs in the family and all,” he said with a shrug. “What are you planning this afternoon?”

“I have a standing date with my brother for homework and stuff in the library. Wanna join us?” Sam asked. 

“Sure,” Blaise agreed quickly. He hadn’t actually been planning to do the homework, but he might as well hang out with Sam and Dean and get some more info on how they were settling in. 

Sam and Blaise beat Dean there this time and settled in so Sam asked for some help with his Runes homework while they waited. There were a few things he didn’t quite understand. It didn’t take long for Dean to come by and drop his books on the desk as he sighed. “I see what you meant about Magical Theory. It’s a nightmare.”

Sam laughed. “I told you you’d hate it.”

“You got your essay on it with you?” Dean asked hopefully, knowing that Sam had done his essay yesterday. 

Sam had been prepared for that and slid it over, rolling his eyes. “Copy it and I’ll kill you,” he warned.

Ron chose that moment to make his and Harry’s almost silent argument known to the world as he exclaimed, “I’m not sitting with any stinking Slytherin!”

Sam rolled his eyes again. “Geez, it’s not like I’m sitting next to Malfoy or anything,” he said the other boys name like it was disgusting. “Blaise is cool.”

“Yeah, god forbid you start talking to Malfoy of all people,” Blaise said making a gagging face. 

“You don’t like Malfoy?” Harry asked taking a seat. Apparently that was good enough for him. 

“No way. He’s a stuck up little prat expecting everything to be handed to him on a silver platter because Daddy has money. I punched him in his bigoted little mouth the first night here and he threatened to sue me,” Blaise said with a laugh. 

Harry laughed at that too. “I wish I could have seen that.”

Ron huffed and sat down grudgingly, but pointedly ignored Blaise the whole afternoon, though Harry and Dean got on well enough with him.


	4. Chapter 4

The next morning as he and Blaise were running, Sam realized that he didn’t even know the distance around the lake that they were running every morning. If he were in his adult body he would be able to estimate, but in an eleven year old body he had no idea how fast he was. If they had to be able to run a set distance in a set time by the end of term, it would be nice to know how they were doing with that goal, so he asked Blaise. “I’m not sure exactly. Some of the older students said it’s just over a mile, but I don’t know if they’re right or not.”

“So we need to be up to two laps around the lake in fifteen minutes or less by the end of term basically,” Sam said with a nod. “Easily doable.”

“Yeah. If you want we can go ahead and start doing two laps, or at least try, and then start working on our time from there,” Blaise said seeing as how Sam didn’t seem to have any difficulties with the one lap. Maybe he should have made the goals a little harder, but given that they were set for the average eleven year old, they were plenty hard already. More might have been pushing it. 

“Sounds good to me…if you think you can keep up,” Sam teased. 

Blaise laughed. “Just remember if you collapse on me I’m not lugging your ass back to the castle.”

Sam shook his head as he joined the other boy in laughter and sped up, pulling ahead of Blaise who put on his own burst of speed to keep up. At the end of their workout, they split up to shower before breakfast and then Sam had his one and only class with Dean. He quickly learned that the history class was not at all like in the books either. Sure, it was still taught by a ghost, but it was actually taught. And interesting. He didn’t get time to talk to Dean after all. 

After lunch, he had his first Magical Beings class, and once again Nearly Headless Nick and the Fat Friar came to talk to the class and Sam actually learned a lot about ghosts that he didn’t know. Apparently dying a violent death wasn’t the only way to become a ghost. Even just being afraid to pass on was enough to stick one here or having any kind of unfinished business. A lot of them even stuck around to watch over their families. The main issue they had is that once you miss your window, it’s not at all easy to find it again and moving on later is a lot more difficult than it may seem. Even for the ones that die violent deaths they don’t always go mad, though they usually do. 

Sam was the last one to the library this time, coming all the way out from Hagrid’s hut, and joined their usual study group. Sam sat down and asked Dean, “So how’s herbology?” 

“Not bad. It’s basically gardening that you have to be a little more careful with. Still got an essay on the plants though,” he said annoyed. “What is it with these teachers and essays? Why can’t they just tell us what we need to know and then test us on it?”

Sam rolled his eyes. He’d heard this same argument when Dean was in high school and didn’t bother anymore. Blaise took his lead from Sam, though Harry and Ron vocally agreed with him and Ron even suggested starting a strike on homework. “Don’t even think about it,” Sam warned good-naturedly. 

“Ravenclaws,” Dean said in mock disgust. 

“Gryffindors,” Sam returned in the same tone. 

After dinner, Sam and Dean got away for some brother time. Sam decided to go search out the kitchens and it took very little convincing to get Dean to go along with him. Very little meaning none at all. “I am glad they actually had burgers tonight for dinner. If I’d had to go seven years without a cheeseburger someone would have died,” Dean said. 

Sam chuckled. “I prayed to Gabriel last night. Asked for a few minor changes. Burgers and pizza and coffee and stuff. Apparently, he listened.”

“Will wonders never cease,” Dean said sarcastically, which was about as close as he would get to a thank you to Gabriel of all people. 

Sam learned that there actually were house elves in this universe Gabriel had created when they descended on them in droves, eager to serve. Dean, of course, asked for pie while Sam just wanted some ice cream. Once they were served at one of the small tables in the kitchens, the house elves left them alone and they were able to talk freely. “Do you have any idea how annoying it is to be eleven again?” Dean asked frustrated. 

“No, Dean. I have no idea,” Sam said sarcastically. “As annoying as it is, I still think Gabriel is giving us a gift here. Not just all the things that we mentioned before, but we actually get to have a normal childhood for the most part. I mean, if things run true to the books there will be a few monsters to fight and all, but still, staying in one place, getting a chance to make friends and play around. We never got that and it’s kinda nice to be able to now, don’t you think?”

“Yeah. I guess when you put it like that it is kinda fun. School sucks, though.”

Sam sighed. He was resigned to listening to Dean bitch for the next seven years. “So don’t suppose anything’s given you an idea yet on the Lucifer situation has it?”

“It’s only halfway through the first week of class!” Dean said incredulously. 

“Yeah, I figured. Just a thought. We should keep an ear open for anything that sparks an idea anyway,” Sam said with a sigh.

“I want a beer,” Dean said with his own sigh and Sam rolled his eyes. 

“What? I always think better with a good buzz,” Dean said defensively. 

“No, Dean. You just think you think better,” Sam said with a chuckle. 

“Whatever, Bitch.”

“Jerk.”

 

The next morning, Sam had his first Herbology class and this time got partnered with a Hufflepuff named Hannah Abbot as they worked with clingvines. While they worked, Professor Sprout lectured on them. She went over how to care for them, how and when to harvest them, and some of their basic uses in potions. Sam was bored stiff, and his partner wasn’t much for conversation. He was looking forward to Spellcrafting that afternoon. He was sure that would be more interesting than this, though he couldn’t deny that Herbology was useful at least. 

Sure enough, Sam had a blast in Spellcrafting. He found that he really had a knack for it. At least so far. It was far more involved than he had expected though, and supposedly it would get even more involved next year when they started tying in Runes, Arithmancy, Potions, and Herbology in with the spells. Sam was one of the few people to get his simple spell to vanish a piece of paper to work. Professor Flitwick explained that spells without anchors such as Runes or Potions only lasted a short time and sure enough, it was only about five minutes before Sam’s paper was visible again. These sorts of spells also weren’t good for finite work. For example, while Sam could write a spell to vanish the paper, vanishing just the words on the paper would require an anchor. 

Once again, he didn’t have any classes with Blaise today, but he still joined them for their homework/study session after classes. Ron was slowly learning to tolerate him. Thankfully. Sam was getting rather annoyed with the redhead for his attitude towards who was quickly becoming his best friend. 

The next day was the day that they had all been waiting for. The first Flying classes. But first they had to get through their other classes. Sam and Dean both had only one class on Friday, but poor Blaise had two to get through before Flying. First, he was with Dean in potions. Then, Sam in Arithmancy. Flying was with all four houses together, and as they lined up next to their brooms, Blaise on one side of Sam, Dean on the other, they were all bouncing with excitement. Well, almost all. Neville and Hermione looked like they were about to throw up, but everyone else was bouncing with excitement. Sam sent up a silent prayer that they wouldn’t get grounded because Neville crashed and it seemed that his prayer was answered. 

Dean was a natural at flying, not that Sam had doubted that at all. Sam loved it, but he wasn’t nearly as daring as his brother was. He would be more the type to take a leisurely flight, but he suspected Dean would be going out for the quidditch team with all the stunts he was doing. Maybe that would keep him from bitching so much about being here, at least. Blaise seemed somewhere in the middle. He mostly kept straight and upright, but every so often would pull out a barrel roll or a dive before settling back in to fly normally. He was…unpredictable was the best word Sam could think of. In fact, that pretty much described Blaise overall.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Time will start moving faster in the next chapter. I just wanted to get through all the classes at least once before I picked up the pace :)


	5. Chapter 5

Over the next few months they settled in fairly well. Sam and Blaise quickly became best friends and Blaise got along well with Dean too. Blaise couldn’t help but wonder if that would last once they found out that he was actually Gabriel, and he was both surprised and annoyed that he found himself hoping that it would. Sam didn’t get along so well with Harry and Ron though. He didn’t not like them, exactly, but found them far too childish to be considered actual friends. Which was understandable since they actually were eleven. It didn’t seem to bother Dean too much though, unsurprisingly. 

It seemed like no time at all to Sam before they got to that dreaded Halloween and Sam was on edge the whole day, just waiting for the shoe to drop at the feast. He knew that there was no such thing as trolls really, but just because they wouldn’t learn about them didn’t mean they didn’t exist in this world as the house elves had proven. Or maybe it would be something else that would get in. Sam spent the whole day running through spells he had learned that might be able to help. If it was a troll, he doubted they would be able to do much to it physically. 

He settled down in his seat for the feast with a sigh. He had tried to get Hermione to come out of the bathroom for the feast, but had no luck. He’d considered staying with her, but that would have been too suspicious and he knew that Harry and Ron would save her, and these people weren’t even real technically so it shouldn’t even matter, but it did. He wouldn’t put it past Gabriel to kill her anyway just for fun. No matter how grateful he may have been for the opportunity he was given, it didn’t change the fact that Gabriel was a killer. 

Sure enough, the thing he dreaded came to pass as Quirrell rushed into the hall yelling about a troll in the dungeons before he collapsed. Sam looked over to the Gryffindor table and nearly laughed as they were all headed out back to their common rooms. Dean had been ignoring Ron most of the feast and now had him by the scruff of the neck marching him out the door. Sam split off from his house and went to catch up with them. He was glad to see Dean sending Harry and Ron back to the dorms, but was very annoyed that he was apparently planning to go up against the troll alone. Sam waited until Harry and Ron turned the corner before he rushed up to Dean so they didn’t have to have the whole ‘how come he gets to go’ conversation. “I got your back,” was all he said as they rushed towards the bathroom where Hermione was hiding. 

They found the troll still lumbering down the hallway. He hadn’t yet entered the bathroom. “I’ll distract it. You get the kid out of there,” Dean said wasting no time knocking over a suit of armor to get the troll’s attention as Sam slipped into the bathroom. Hermione’s scream as she saw the troll completely undid all the work Dean had done distracting it and Sam just sighed heavily and started chanting his invisibility spell and she disappeared.

“You’re invisible now. Just run back to the tower,” he said to the area she last was. “It’ll only last for a few minutes so hurry,” he said giving her a push just to see if she was still there and she was. Thankfully that push seemed to get her moving because the troll was almost on them now. Sure enough, physical attacks did nothing to it, but thankfully their hunter reflexes were good enough to keep them away from that club. “Let’s just lead it down to the teachers,” Sam said when he realized they weren’t going to be able to hurt it. 

“Fine,” Dean said annoyed, but knowing Sam was right, so they both started running. 

They ran into Professors McGonagal, Flitwick, and Snape who quickly set up wards to trap the troll and then chanted a spell to put it to sleep before McGonagal rounded on the two first years. “And why aren’t you two in your houses?” she asked, lips pursed in annoyance. 

Dean had no problem telling her the truth. “Hermione Granger was in the bathroom crying because Ron was an ass…um…jerk to her. She didn’t know about the troll. I went to get her.”

“And your excuse?” She asked turning to Sam. 

“I saw him slip away from the group and I wasn’t about to let my brother walk around the castle alone with a troll on the loose,” he said honestly. 

“Ten points from each of you for not notifying a teacher. Get to your common rooms now before I take more,” she said sternly. 

Sam, not wanting to raise her ire anymore, gave his brother a quick nod before rushing off to the Ravenclaw common room, but Dean just turned around and walked at a leisurely pace. He was never one to bow to authority. 

Gabriel didn’t know why he was surprised that Sam went after the troll, but he suddenly found himself wanting to wring his neck for it and he didn’t even know why. The next morning, while they were running, he brought it up. “So word is you went after the troll last night?” He waited until he got a confirmation before he laid into the hunter. “What the hell were you thinking? You could have been killed or something!”

“I wasn’t just going to let a girl get killed. Besides, if anything did happen to me, I’m sure it would be fixed up in no time,” Sam said honestly and Blaise/Gabriel seethed. So Sam was going to keep throwing himself into danger because he figured Gabriel would keep him safe? He might just need to teach the hunter a lesson. He once again found himself surprised and annoyed at the discomfort that thought gave him. He didn’t want to hurt Sam. He made a quick decision though that if Sam got himself hurt he would leave him to heal from it the normal way. No quick healing from him. And if the stupid hunter got himself killed, he would bring him back, but just enough to be alive. He could deal with the other consequences. 

Once the whole Halloween thing played out like the books, other than his and Dean’s involvement of course, Sam was now sure that the Philosopher’s stone was hidden here in the castle behind the locked door on the third floor. He would wait until after Christmas break to go for it though when he knew everything would be set up after Harry found the mirror. In the meantime, he spent his time going over what he knew of the obstacles, hoping they would be the same, and planning how to get past them with the different magic. 

He could write a spell to unlock the door. That should be easy enough with what they’d learned so far in Flitwick’s class. Hopefully music still worked on the dog. He could find a lighter and set the devil’s snare on fire. Dean should be able to catch the key on the brooms. He was a pretty good chess player. They’d just have to be careful not to get stuck on one of the pieces that got hurt. He could make himself and Dean invisible long enough to get past the troll. The logic puzzle should be cake, as well as getting the stone from the mirror. Part of him wished he could bring Blaise along for the chess game, the other boy being much better than him, but he was loathe to put any actual children in danger, and he was good enough to get by. Hopefully. He resolved to play a lot of chess with Blaise in the meantime to practice though. 

It wasn’t until the lists came by to sign up to stay at the castle over Christmas that he wondered what Gabriel had in mind for breaks, or would they just end one year and go straight into the new one. That would drive Dean insane, not even getting a summer break, but it would shorten their time here. It might raise questions though about lack of communication over the summer months. It would be nice to have a break and enjoy their freedom for a little while. They’d never really had a break, other than Sam’s school breaks at Stanford. Hunting wasn’t exactly the kind of job you could just take a vacation from.


	6. Chapter 6

“So you’re staying over Christmas too?” Blaise asked Sam as would have been expected of him. 

“Yeah. Don’t really have anywhere else to go,” Sam said with a shrug before he realized what he had said and started to take it back, but finally decided that if Gabriel was going to dump them in this world without any info on their backstory, he could clean up any messes they inadvertently made because of it. 

“What about your parents?” Blaise asked non-chalantly. “They don’t want you home?”

“They died,” Sam said shortly. “What about yours?” he shot back perhaps not as nicely as he could have. 

“Sorry,” Blaise said lacing as much sympathy as he could manage in the word. “My dad will be on a business trip over Christmas, so it’s either stay home alone all break, or stay here.”

Sam started to relax at that. “What about your mom?” Sam asked curiously. He never realized that as much as he and Blaise talked about anything and everything, family had never come up. 

“Don’t have one,” he said with a shrug and then tried to backtrack a bit. “I mean, I’m sure I must have had one at some point, but I never knew her and asking my dad never gets me anything except a drunk dad,” he clarified. 

“That sucks. He should at least tell you about her. You don’t know anything at all?” Sam asked incredulously. 

“Doesn’t really matter. I don’t know her and I doubt I’ll ever know her…if she’s even still alive. No point learning to miss someone I’ll never know.”

Sam thought that was rather cold, but he supposed that if he hadn’t had Dean and Dad to tell him about Mom and show him pictures and stuff, he might feel the same way. Or at least pretend to feel the same way so no one would see how much he hurt. Sam narrowed his eyes at Blaise as if trying to read him, but eventually had to give up. Blaise had rock solid masks and Sam had never been able to see through him when he was trying to hide something. Either way, he didn’t see any need to continue the conversation. He didn’t want to bring up a sore subject any more than they already had. 

Blaise just had one more thing to say though. “If you need a place to stay for the summer, my door is open. To you and your brother.”

“Your dad would be cool with that?” Sam asked curiously. 

“Sure. He doesn’t really care what I do. He probably wouldn’t even notice you were there. He rarely does me either,” Blaise said with a shrug.

Sam just nodded. He could relate. Still. “Do me a favor and ask him anyway…as long as it won’t cause you any trouble that is…just to be sure.”

“Sure thing,” Blaise said dismissively. Sam wondered if that hadn’t been Gabriel’s plan all along. For them to find friends to stay with during the summer or if Gabriel would have made plans for them if they hadn’t. Probably not. Would have been just like him to leave them to fend for themselves. He was glad he’d found such a good friend in Blaise. Whether they ended up taking him up on it or not, the offer was nice. 

When the students who were leaving left the castle for the break, Sam finally let Dean in on what was hidden in the castle under their noses. “So that’s what the hellhound is guarding!” was his response. 

Sam pinched the bridge of his nose. He should have known that Dean would go looking for trouble, or that Harry and Ron would drag him along in theirs. Either way, Dean was ahead of the game. “Yes, Dean, but there are a lot of other traps too. Assuming Gabriel didn’t change them too much, we should be able to get past them fine.”

“It’s about time we did something fun around here,” Dean said with a grin. “When do we go?”

“Harry should be finding an old mirror soon. Once Dumbledore confronts him and moves it, we’ll wait until he’s out of the castle for dinner then go,” Sam told him. He knew that no one dared going after it while Dumbledore was in the castle, and had no idea if it was paranoia or justified, so he didn’t want to chance it. 

They got their chance about two days before all the students came back to the school. When they went down for dinner, the headmaster was conspicuously absent so he caught Dean’s eye and nodded. They ate quickly and slipped away to the third floor. Sam chanted a spell to unlock the door and they slipped in. Dean had a better voice than he did, so he had already told Dean that he would have to sing the dog to sleep, which his brother had quickly scoffed at, and swore that if Sam was making fun of him he’d make him regret it forever. It worked though and when the dog was snoozing they jumped down the hole landing on the devil’s snare. 

Sam brought out a lighter and set it on fire and they dropped the last few feet to the ground. Dean whooped when he saw the brooms and it didn’t take him long to grab the right key. When they got to the chess set, Sam sent Dean to the king and he took the queen himself. He was never one for sacrificing his queen so it should be safe enough and if the king got caught they lost anyway. The game took a long time and Sam got pretty nervous more than once, but managed to eek out a win with only three pieces left on the board. 

Once they were to the other side of the room, Sam chanted his invisibility spell over Dean while his brother did the same for him and they opened the door and made a run for it to the other side before it wore off and found themselves in the room with the logic puzzle. Sam never could remember it word for word, or remember exactly which bottle would get them through, so he would have to solve it. Thankfully, Sam had always been good at puzzles and riddles and being in Ravenclaw had only made him better as he had to answer a riddle every time he had to go to the tower. It didn’t take him long to figure it out, but just like in the books there was only enough for one of them. 

“Okay, so I’ll go get the stone, you wait here, and we’ll head back the way we came and take the brooms out of here,” Sam reiterated the plan. 

“Yeah, okay. Just hurry. I don’t want to be caught down here.” Dean had never been a fan of dark enclosed spaces, not that he would ever admit it. 

Sam nodded and drank the potion, jumping through the fire to find himself faced with the mirror. He set his mind on protecting the stone from Voldemort and stepped in front of the mirror. It was almost like he could feel it judging him for a good long while before he felt a lump in his pocket. He pulled out the stone, grinned, and rushed back to Dean. They managed to make it back to their dorms before curfew and it seemed with no one the wiser. Sam hid the stone at the bottom of his trunk where it would have to stay for the next seven years until they got out of here. He couldn’t risk anyone else seeing it. 

Gabriel, of course, knew that they were going after the stone and watched their progress invisibly. When he put it here, he didn’t much care one way or the other whether they got it or not. It may come in handy in their fight to lock Lucifer away or it may not. It would definitely make their lives easier though what will being able to make gold, they wouldn’t have to worry about money anymore. Before he became friends with them, that wouldn’t have mattered, but somehow now he was glad that they had it and would lend his assistance in keeping it hidden while they were here. He may have created the world, but he created it to be self-perpetuating. While he could TAKE control of things here, he didn’t HAVE control and it was too distracting to keep an eye on everything all the time so keeping the stone hidden was necessary.


	7. Chapter 7

Sam learned from Dean and Harry and Ron were more than curious about what was behind the third floor corridor after accidentally running across the hellhound, but it seemed that without Hermione’s insatiable curiosity and zeal for research, they weren’t nearly as gung ho about finding out as they were in the books. Sam supposed that Hermione had pushed them to do more than study after all. Thankfully, they still had their study group in the library every day, so they still did that. In fact, Ron’s grades seemed to be better than they had been in the books. Even if he still didn’t like Blaise much and spent much of their study group complaining and very little time working, it seemed that some things sunk in via osmosis. 

Sam had been watching Quirrel all year, and still couldn’t figure out if he was possessed by Voldemort in this universe. There had been enough strange happenings that he was sure Voldemort was around, but Quirrel didn’t seem overly focused on Harry or suffering any ill effects from a supposed possession. There had been unicorns killed, but again, Quirrel didn’t seem to be suffering for it, so perhaps Voldemort was just lurking around somewhere instead of attached to the defense teacher’s head. 

Sam found out in their Magical Beings class why the loss of any of the unicorns was such a big deal. It seemed that unicorns were nearly extinct in the world and the herd in the forbidden forest was the last of their kind. Sam wondered if that was Gabriel’s way of telling them that unicorns used to exist, but don’t anymore. Maybe one day he would ask. Needless to say, they didn’t spend much time on unicorns in class. Just a brief overview because, as Hagrid said, they wouldn’t need the information in the real world. 

Sam was getting more and more tense as the end of the year approached, and Blaise noticed. “You doing okay, Sam? You seem on edge lately.”

“Yeah. I’m good. Just nervous about exams and the summer and all,” Sam said dismissively. He couldn’t exactly admit that he was worried about Voldemort and the stone and whether Harry and Ron would still try to go after him. 

“You’ll do fine on exams, and I showed you the letter from my dad, saying that you and your brother can stay with us for the summer,” Blaise tried to reassure him and he really meant it. He had been surprised when Sam and Dean took to this experience with minimal fuss and they both seemed to be grasping the opportunity with both hands. Sam more so than Dean, but even Dean was studying and making an effort, even if he left most of the heavy lifting up to his brother. 

Dean had been waffling on whether or not to stay with Blaise until he was assured that he could still visit his other friends as much as he wanted. Dean would have rather stayed with Ron, who also offered, but he wasn’t about to be separated from his brother and Ron and Sam didn’t completely get along due to Sam’s close friendship with Blaise. Sam didn’t feel much better, but thought of an excuse. “It’s just the whole staying in a new place with someone I don’t know. I’m sure I’ll be fine once we get there and all. I just don’t really like the unknown, ya know?”

“Yeah. I get that. Just try and relax a little. No point worrying yourself to death,” Blaise suggested. 

“I’ll try,” Sam said with a smile for his best friend. Blaise, somehow, always knew how to calm him down. He never would have imagined having a best friend other than Dean, but he now realized just how valuable that friendship was. He even had someone to bitch to when Dean was being an idiot which was something he’d never had before. 

The end of the year came faster than any of them could have imagined, and exams were upon them. Sam, Dean, and Blaise all passed defense with flying colors. Harry and Ron passed too, just not as well, not having the prior training of Sam and Dean, or Sam pushing him to keep up like Blaise. Magical Theory and Spellcrafting were Sam’s best subjects and he wiped the board with them and ended up top of the class. Dean did pretty well too, getting a high EE. Sam actually ended up with all Os, though his potions and runes were low Os. Surprisingly enough, other than defense, Dean’s best classes were potions and herbology. Blaise led the pack in Runes and Arithmancy, and they all did very well in magical beings. 

The day the exam results came out, the five of them went down to sit by the lake and compare them. Harry got mostly Os with a few EEs same as Dean, though they were in different classes. Ron got mostly EEs and a few As, but he seemed ecstatic with his results even though they were the worst of the group. It seemed that since he did better than his brothers Fred and George, he was happy. Sam didn’t have the heart to tell him that they didn’t even try and were far smarter than they let on. 

The leaving feast was coupled with an announcement from Dumbledore, who suddenly looked to have aged a decade and Sam was immediately concerned. The announcement was very vague, but Sam could read between the lines. It seemed that Voldemort had gone after the stone and escaped and when he found the stone gone, he probably assumed that Voldemort had it. Sam felt a brief pang of guilt and thought about finding a way to let him know that it was still safe, but then came to his senses and realized that it would cause no end of problems for them, and Dumbledore wasn’t even real. There was no point. Sam was relieved to see Harry and Ron sitting at the Gryffindor table looking no worse for wear. It seemed they hadn’t gone after it after all. 

The five of them sat together on the train and when they got to King’s Cross station, Blaise made a show of looking disappointed that his father wasn’t there and told Sam, “I’m not really surprised. We can take the floo,” he said as he led them towards the fireplaces. 

When they came out on the other end it was in a really nice manor house. It was large and opulent, without being ostentatious. It was homey, was the best word Sam could think of as he looked around. “Dude, you live here?” Dean asked incredulously. 

“Yep. It’s pretty nice here. There’s even a quidditch pitch out back,” he said with a grin, succeeding at distracting Dean. 

“Dude! Now I really wish I had a broom,” Dean said excitedly. 

“We probably have some spares around here somewhere. They might be a little old though,” Blaise said with a shrug. “Let’s get our stuff upstairs. I’ll show you to your rooms and then I’ll see if I can find my dad and let him know we’re back.” He made sure they didn’t need to though. They were headed down the upstairs hallway, when he materialized an older man, with a heavy white beard and long white hair walking down the hallway absentmindedly scribbling on a book. He was sure that his father had a new human vessel nowadays, but he didn’t know what it looked like so he went with his old look. “Hi dad. This is Sam and Dean Winchester,” he said cheerfully. 

His father barely glanced up as he said, “Mhmm. That’s nice,” and kept walking. 

Perhaps Gabriel was being a little petulant with his portrayal of his father, but he didn’t care. He looked to Sam and Dean and shrugged as he said, “Okay you can have these two rooms. Mine is on the end.”

Dean rushed into the third room, leaving Sam to take the one between himself and Blaise, but Sam reached out and put a hand on Blaise’s shoulder before he could go into his own room. “You okay?” he asked concerned, appalled at the complete lack of caring by his best friend’s father. 

“I’m good, Sammykins. I’m used to it by now,” Blaise said with another shrug and a slight smile to let Sam know that he really was okay and they headed to their respective rooms to get their stuff put away. 

That evening an owl arrived, addressed to Sam and Dean. Dean looked at it curiously for a moment as if it was going to bite them. They had never gotten mail. Sam just rolled his eyes and took the letter. “That’s the Gringotts seal,” he said curiously as he went to open it.


	8. Chapter 8

“Gringotts?” Dean asked confused. 

“The bank? You’d think you would have picked up SOMEthing at school all year,” Sam said rolling his eyes. 

“What does the bank want with us?” Dean asked no less confused than he was before. 

“If you’d let me read it I’ll tell you,” Sam said as his brother finally shut up and he opened the letter. “Hmm,” he said thoughtfully as he finished. 

“What?” Dean asked impatiently. 

“It seems that Gabriel realized that we would need to blend in or something and buy our school supplies or whatever, but he left us a vault.”

“A vault?”

“Money, Dean,” Sam said with another roll of his eyes. “Probably the currency they use here. Wouldn’t be much use back in the real world I’d imagine.”

“So we’re rich?” Dean asked hopefully. 

“I don’t know. It doesn’t say how much is there, and even if it did, I wouldn’t know if that would make us rich or not since I don’t know how much things cost here. We need to go to the bank anyway, and maybe we should get Blaise to come with us. He’d have a better idea of that kind of thing.” Sam suggested. 

“Take me where and a better idea of what?” Blaise asked, meandering lazily into the kitchen. 

 

“We got a letter from Gringotts. Some distant relative left us some money, but neither of us have ever really done our own shopping so we don’t have any idea how much stuff costs and how far our money could stretch,” Sam told him. 

“Oh. Yeah. Sure. I can help you out. I’m pretty good with money,” Blaise told them. “Wanna go in the morning? Then we can do some shopping and hang out in the alley for the day,” he suggested. 

“That works. Thanks, man,” Dean said gratefully. He was still hoping they had enough for him to buy a racing broom. Sam was mostly thinking about books. 

The next morning, they hit the alley as soon as they all woke up, which was more like mid-morning before Dean joined them. When they got to Gringotts, both Sam and Dean had to give up a little blood to verify their identities before they were given keys and an account statement and asked to wait for a goblin to take them to their vaults. 

Sam handed the account statement over to Blaise for him to look over and he whistled appreciatively. “This should be enough to last you the next twenty years if you’re careful with it,” he told them. Of course, he knew that they wouldn’t need it to last twenty years and thus had no reason to be careful, but they didn’t know that he knew that. He’d decided to reward their good attitude about this whole thing and help them make the most of it, so he made sure that money wasn’t an issue. He definitely didn’t want them to risk causing trouble by being tempted to use the stone to make gold after all. 

“And if we’re not careful?” Dean asked wondering just how much leeway they had.

“Even if you go nuts you should have at least enough to get you through school,” Blaise told them, knowing that they wouldn’t hesitate to do so. 

“Awesome!” Dean said excitedly and the goblin chose that moment to come over to take them to their vault. They both filled up a large back with gold coins after riding the most harrowing rollercoaster Sam had ever been on. Dean, of course, enjoyed it immensely and made a beeline for the quidditch store. Sam had no desire to spend god knows how long looking at brooms and stuff, and he knew that Dean had no desire to do the same in the bookstore so they split up. Blaise, of course, stuck with Sam. 

As they looked around the bookstore, Sam started grabbing all kinds of books about every subject, but mostly magical theory, Spellcrafting, runes, and arithmancy, those being the most important in his mind. He did get quite a bit on potions and herbology too though. He was very glad that the bags the bookstore gave out had lightening spells on them or he would have been hard pressed to carry his new library around. Blaise made a suggestion as he saw Dean also coming out of the quidditch store with a whole armload of things including two brooms and a full quidditch set. “Why don’t we head over to the trunk shop. They have expanded trunks with a library and storage compartments.”

“Awesome!” Dean said again. There was other shopping he wanted to do and didn’t particularly want to lug all this around all day. He had pretty much resigned himself to making multiple trips through the floo to drop stuff off, but this was much better. 

Both Sam and Dean got the largest model trunk. Not only was money not an object, but they both planned on it lasting them the whole time they were there. They did get different features though. Sam’s focused more on library space and not a whole lot on storage, whereas Dean’s was the opposite. He had a small library section and a lot of storage. The next stop they made was the weapons store. They would still have to wait until their fourth year before they got into any weapons training at school, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t get cool weapons in the meantime. They wouldn’t get everything though. Just their favorites. This was one area where they were very similar. They both got swords and throwing stars, along with the necessary accoutrements like pouches for the stars, scabbard for the sword, belts to hold them, etc. Blaise reminded them that they would have to go in their trunks. They weren’t allowed to carry the weapons in public until the school certified them in their use. 

They stopped for lunch and then went to Fortescue’s for ice cream before Blaise talked them into clothes shopping. He only succeeded because they knew they needed more clothes than just the school uniforms that Gabriel had given them when they got here, so they very quickly updated their wardrobes with casual clothes for the summer. They were both extremely glad they didn’t have to wear robes in the summer. Neither of them had been very happy about the whole uniform thing and Sam wondered if Gabriel didn’t leave that the same just to annoy them. 

It was mid-afternoon before they left the alley, and still had what Blaise assured them would be more than enough to get their school supplies later in the summer without having to go back to their vault. Dean looked disappointed at that and immediately started making plans to spend more money this summer, but Sam was relieved. He saw the calculating look on his brother’s face and resolved to make him go down to the vault alone if needed. Blaise watched all this play out and couldn’t help but laugh. 

Needless to say, as soon as they got back, Sam and Blaise both got roped into a game of quidditch. Thankfully there was only a couple hours until lunch. They tried Sam against Dean with Blaise as keeper for both sides, but Dean flied circles around Sam so they switched. Sam played keeper and Blaise went head to head with Dean. It was a little more even that time and they both ended up with pretty high scores, mostly because Sam wasn’t a very good keeper either. If he couldn’t save the shot with his broom upright and relatively level then he didn’t save it at all. 

Thankfully, Blaise had house elves to take care of meals and laundry and cleaning, because they didn’t see Blaise’s father at all that evening. Not even at dinner. The next morning, Dean said he was going over to Ron’s to play quidditch, apparently wanting some real competition. Sam told him to let Ron borrow his broom if he wanted. Since Dean had bought Sam the same racing broom he had, Sam had no intention of using it without his brother there anyway. For the way he flied, the older brooms that Blaise had were plenty good enough. As much as he loved being up in the air, the death defying stunts weren’t really for him. He and Blaise did go flying though. Blaise showed him the whole estate and surrounding area and they had a picnic at the lake for lunch. 

Sam and Blaise kept up their workouts all summer, though not quite as driven as they were during the school year. Neither of them wanted to get out of shape though. Blaise also knew a little about swords already so taught Sam and Dean both what he knew for the summer so they would have a head start when they got to swords in defense. It wasn’t much, but they had fun. Dean spent a few days a week over at Ron’s house, mostly playing quidditch, and Sam got roped into going with him a couple times, but not often. He usually bowed out of quidditch though, knowing that he wasn’t up to par with any of the Weasley players. He generally spent that time talking to Percy, who was the only one in the family who didn’t play. The prefect was a little stuck-up, but he didn’t mind answering Sam’s endless questions, so it worked. Still he didn’t want to deal with him often and only ended up going over there three times over the whole summer.


	9. Chapter 9

When the booklists came out, Sam and Dean went shopping for supplies with Blaise, meeting Harry, Ron, and the Weasleys there. After the altercation in the bookstore that Sam remembered from the books, he pulled Dean aside and told him about the diary and told him to steal it and hide it if he saw it. He hoped he would get it before the end of the summer so they could hide it in their vault rather than keeping it at school. They already had the stone hidden there anyway. What was one more illegal item? 

Dean ended up managing to get it just a few days before they were due to get on the train and he handed it over to Sam. “I hope you’re right about this. I feel like a real ass stealing a little girl’s diary.”

“Here,” Sam said handing him a blank black diary. “Give this to her. Tell her you found it downstairs or something and thought it might be hers. She’ll think the enchantment wore off or something and even if I’m wrong about this one at least she has a replacement.”

“I still don’t like it,” Dean said petulantly, headed back for the floo with the replacement book in his hands. Sam flooed out right after him, headed for the alley to hide this one in the vault. He had managed to avoid going last time, sending Dean on without him, but he didn’t have much of a choice this time. 

The five of them shared an apartment on the express and they had all pretty much gotten used to Ron’s cold attitude towards Blaise and to a lesser extent, Sam. Sam’s only crime was being friends with a Slytherin which was apparently not as big a sin as being said Slytherin. At least he had gotten over making an issue of it because neither Sam nor Dean wanted to give up either their brother or their friends. 

Sam couldn’t help but groan when he saw Gilderoy Lockhart sitting at the head table. He had hoped that Gabriel would give them a real teacher. Then again, he did make Quirrel a good teacher so maybe he had done that again. It didn’t take long for word to spread that while the new defense teacher was decent enough in martial arts to be a good teacher for the younger years, he was pretty much a fraud at everything else. Sam just shook his head when he learned that. It seemed that Gabriel was making an attempt to make sure they learned something without changing everything too much. 

This year, they started working basic runes into their Spellcrafting class and Sam found himself understanding runes a little better now that he could see them in action. They were also incorporating the arithmancy they learned last year into Magical theory. Magical beings this year was going more in-depth and was split between werewolves for the first semester and vampires for the second. 

This year, Sam was glad to see that he had more classes with Dean. He was with the Gryffindors and Slytherins almost equally and only one class with Hufflepuff this year. Since he had no friends in Hufflepuff he was good with that. He partnered with Dean of course in all the Gryffindor classes and continued to partner with Blaise in the Slytherin classes which included, Defense, Runes, Arthmancy, and Spellcrafting. He was with Dean for Magical Theory, Magical Beings, Potions, and History, and he still had Herbology with the Hufflepuffs. 

Dean was far more excited about quidditch tryouts than classes for the first part of the year, and spent pretty much every day after dinner practicing on his broom. Usually with Harry and Ron along for the ride. Ron wanted to try out too, for the reserve team of course since the captain was the keeper and wouldn’t be likely to give up his own position. His only problem was that he didn’t have a broom, so Sam quickly offered to let him borrow his. His only caveat was that when he wanted to go for a fly Ron had to give it up without question as long as there wasn’t practice or a game of course. The redhead quickly agreed and started warming up to Sam a little more after that. It was one thing letting him borrow it through his brother during the summer, but essentially letting him use it all year was different. 

Dean and Ron both made the reserve team, but assuming all went well, Dean would be moving up to starting chaser next year while Ron had to wait two years for Oliver to graduate. Harry, of course, was still on the starting team from last year as seeker, so all three of them were quidditch crazy and Sam was more glad than ever that Blaise wasn’t a quidditch player. He had someone to go to for sanity when they got to be too much. 

Sam was glad when the Halloween feast went uninterrupted this year, since he’d taken the diary out of play. He also noticed that Ginny Weasley seemed far more upbeat without its influence too. It seemed like it might be a peaceful year and he was right. It passed quickly and uneventfully. Sam, Dean, Blaise, and Harry all stayed over Christmas break again, though Ron went home this year. Sam and Dean, despite having one last year, were still new to this whole real Christmas thing so the novelty hadn’t even come close to wearing off yet and they had a blast. 

In February, all second years were told that they would have to choose one to two electives from next year on and were given a list of the available electives which were Divination, Astronomy, and Warding. Their group of five got together to decide which ones to do. Ron quickly decided to only go for one and chose Divination. Harry went with Divination too, but also added Astronomy. Blaise chose Astronomy and Warding. Sam and Dean had a silent discussion while they were all making their decisions and they definitely wanted to cover all three subjects so Sam went with Blaise on Astronomy and Warding and Dean chose Divination and, after Sam made a good point that they both needed to know warding, he reluctantly went with Warding as a second. 

End of year tests rolled around, and went much like they had the year before, except that Harry joined Sam, Dean, and Blaise at the top of the class in defense. Ron was excited that he actually got an O in something, even if it was just Herbology. Ron had gotten an A in History, but the rest of his grades were EEs, which was far better than he had expected. Sam and Blaise both got all Os again. Dean got more Os than last year and he only had two EEs in Magical Theory and Runes, while Harry had a pretty even mix of Os and EEs. 

Once again, Sam and Dean were spending the summer with Blaise. Last summer they had seen his father all of five times, and never once had a conversation with man. When Blaise had told Sam that his father rarely noticed he was there, Sam hadn’t realized it was quite that bad, but now he was glad that he and Dean could keep him company over the summer. Once again, they were left alone at King’s Cross with no one to pick them up so they flooed back to Blaise’s house and dropped off their stuff in what had become their rooms before heading out to Diagon alley. They all needed new summer clothes, having outgrown last year’s. 

Blaise took them to a different store this time, one that had funny t-shirts and they actually had fun checking out all the different shirts and picking on each other when they found vaguely insulting ones. They ended up spending most of the evening there and stopped by the Leaky Cauldron for dinner before heading back. The summer passed much like the last one. Dean spent a few days a week at the Weasley’s, leaving Sam and Blaise to spend those days together except for the rare occasions that Sam got dragged along to the Weasley’s with his brother. That only lasted for the first few weeks though before the Weasley’s won a contest and took a trip to Egypt for the rest of the summer. 

The three of them also went to Diagon Alley a couple times a week and were very surprised when, during the last few weeks of the summer, they met Harry there. Apparently he had ran away from his aunt and uncles house. Even Sam was surprised, and realized that with so much changing and other stuff staying the same he was having trouble keeping things straight in his head. It wasn’t so much about the books anymore as this was becoming his life and so the little things like that tended to slip his mind. He remembered the whole thing about Sirius Black escaping and realized that was the same when they got the newspaper a few days before, but his mind hadn’t connected it with Harry running away. 

Blaise, of course, being the nice guy he is, invited Harry to stay with him for the rest of the summer instead of at the Leaky Cauldron. Harry considered it for a bit before he decided that the grief he would get from Ron would be worth being able to play quidditch this summer and hang out with friends rather than be alone at a dingy inn. While the four of them went to get their school supplies as soon as the lists went out, they still met Ron and his family there the last day of holidays and hung out with them while they shopped. Harry stayed the last night with the Weasley’s at the Leaky Cauldron before they met back up on the train the next morning, headed to their third year.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know second year went kinda fast, but once Sam stopped the whole Chamber of secrets thing there wasn't much left there and since twelve is still too young to go anywhere with a relationship between Sam and Blaise/Gabriel I kinda just glossed over that year. Third year should be different though. Most of the books will still be in play, unlike the last two years, plus they are thirteen now, and there are new classes so don't worry. They won't all be like that.


	10. Chapter 10

The five of them found a compartment on the train that already had a sleeping occupant. RL Lupin according to his briefcase and Sam couldn’t help but smile. Remus had always been one of his favorite characters in the books, and he’d been hoping they’d see him this year. What he’d been hoping to skip was the dementor visit, but that wasn’t to be. Thankfully, the sleeping professor was jolted awake by their presence and managed to ward it away. “What the hell was that thing?!” Dean said taking a few deep breaths to get himself back under control. 

“That was a dementor. They are part of the shtriga family, but where shtrigas only prey on children, dementors are indiscriminate in their feeding. You will learn more about them in your Magical Being’s class since they are to be stationed around the school for the foreseeable future, but don’t worry. They won’t enter the grounds,” the professor told them. 

Sam and Dean both let out a shudder at the mention of Shtrigas. They both clearly remembered Sam’s close call with one and now that he was thinking about it, he could see the similarities between them and dementors. He had a feeling their class would focus more on the shtrigas than dementors though, given Gabriel’s desire for them to learn about the real things rather than similar ones. 

They made it to the school with no further incidents, and Sam pulled Dean aside before the feast to fill him in on the fact that their new professor was a werewolf, but a good one, and that he would need to keep it a secret. He didn’t want to risk Dean finding out on his own and going off halfcocked. Dean seemed skeptical about the idea of a good werewolf, but Sam convinced him that it was a Harry Potter thing, so he let it go. 

This year, Sam had Runes, Arithmancy, Defense, and Astronomy with Blaise, Warding, Magical Theory, Spellcrafting, and Magical Beings with Dean, and Herbology, Potions, and History with the Hufflepuffs. It was a little more even, but he still wished he had fewer classes with the Hufflepuffs and more with Dean and Blaise. Even after two years, he still hadn’t found anyone in his year in Hufflepuff that he could talk to. They were all just…children. It was the main reason he wasn’t as close to Harry and Ron. Somehow Blaise seemed immune to that though. Maybe because he seemed to have basically raised himself, but he wasn’t nearly as childish as the rest of the students in the school, making him the perfect best friend. 

Sam and Dean started the year with Magical Beings, which Hagrid opened with saying that instead of studying shapeshifters and skinwalkers the first term and ghouls and wendigos the second term, as planned. They would be starting with Shtrigas the first term this year instead of in their fifth like usual due to the dementors surrounding the school. Despite the fact that he was expecting it, Sam couldn’t help but sigh. This one would be difficult for he and Dean no matter when they studied them. It was the one time that a monster came after Sam before he could protect himself, and the one time Dean couldn’t protect him. It was pure luck that their father had come back in the nick of time. 

Sam’s next class was defense and it was nice to be able to work out his feelings after a difficult morning by ‘beating up’ on Blaise. While they were walking to the library after class, Blaise asked him about it though. “You seemed pretty intense in class today,” he commented. 

“Sorry,” Sam said with a wince. 

“No, it’s okay. I like a challenge. Just…you okay?” he asked concerned, and he was surprised to find that he actually was concerned, not just pretending anymore. 

“Yeah. It’s just…when I was little Dean and I were home alone and a Shtriga attacked. Our dad made it home in time to stop it…barely…but it’s difficult now…between the dementors around and learning about them in class,” Sam tried to explain. 

Blaise couldn’t help himself as he stopped and pulled Sam into a hug before he even realized what he was doing, but when Sam hugged him back, he didn’t dare pull back right away. “I’m sorry, Sam. That must have been terrifying for both of you,” he said. 

Sam was just as surprised as Blaise was when he hugged him, but it was nice. He and Dean weren’t very big huggers and he didn’t have any other friends here so it had basically been years since he’d gotten a hug from anyone, so accepted it gratefully. “Thank you, Blaise. Really.”

“I wish there was a way to get you out of that class so you wouldn’t have to be reminded of that all the time,” he said sadly as he pulled away. Sam and Dean needed to know this stuff though so he couldn’t change it now, even if he could do so while avoiding suspicion. “But feel free to pull me aside for a spar anytime you need to let go of some tension,” he offered. 

Sam smiled and slung an arm over Blaise’s shoulder giving him a slight squeeze. “You’re a good friend, you know.”

“Yes, actually, I do,” Blaise said preening theatrically and they both dissolved into laughter. 

Sam did end up pulling Blaise aside to spar more often, and he did a lot of sparring with his brother too. He never did get Dean and Harry, who worked out together, to join him and Blaise. Neither of them wanted to get up that early in the morning to work out before breakfast, choosing instead to do so after dinner. As Sam had suspected, dementors were only touched on, explaining their differences from their shtriga brethren and moving on. While part of Sam thought that all the extra information on all these creatures was overkill, he could see how knowing their origins, history, how their anatomy and physiology differed from humans and everything else might be useful some day. Maybe they could even find better ways to fight them. 

It wasn’t until the shtriga course where he found himself ruminating more on that when he realized that Gabriel’s goal wasn’t just for them to stop the apocalypse. He was training them to be better hunters overall. After all, what did ghosts and shtrigas and vampires and werewolves have to do with stopping Lucifer. He slowly found his demeanor softening towards the errant archangel, but he didn’t think he could ever completely trust him or consider him anything more than a grudging ally. Not after Mystery Spot, but he didn’t think he hated him anymore either, which was surprising enough itself. 

Things went pretty routing up until the first quidditch match of the season. It was Gryffindor against Hufflepuff and Sam sat in the stands with Gryffindor colors to support his brother, and surprisingly enough so did Blaise. He of course, sat with Sam rather than the Slytherins so he didn’t get beat up for it. The only time they sat separately during the games actually was during the Slytherin/Ravenclaw game. They sat in the Ravenclaw section usually, but Slytherin when they were playing. 

The game was going pretty well for a while, but Sam felt a sense of foreboding, like he was forgetting something important. It wasn’t until the dementors descended onto the pitch that he remembered. He was so glad that Dean wasn’t a starter and was thus, on the ground, but he watched with dread as they went after the seekers high above the other players. He kept repeating to himself that they would be okay. Everything worked out in the end, even though Gryffindor lost the match, but watching it happen was a different story. He heard the sickening crunch when Harry hit the ground unconscious and the very subdued cheer from the Hufflepuff stands when Cedric Diggory caught the snitch even as the entire staff rushed towards the pitch casting wards to keep the dementors away. Only Sam noticed the large black dog slinking off towards the forbidden forest. 

Sam started to consider at that point how he could help make things work out better that year. Maybe he could bring Peter’s animagus form to Dumbledore’s attention somehow so Sirius could be free and maybe Voldemort wouldn’t rise again. That would also, hopefully, get the dementors away. He wished he had thought of it sooner, but the question would be how to do it. He realized that he hadn’t chose a semester project for Spellcrafting yet. Maybe he could write a spell that would show an animal in animagus form and since they had the class with the Gryffindors, he could borrow Ron’s rat to demonstrate and ask McGonagal to be there too to show the difference, not that there would be one, that way between the two teachers they could catch him and bring it to Dumbledore. It would be more complicated than any spell he’d tried so far and he might need to draft Blaise’s help with the runes, but it could be doable.


	11. Chapter 11

Sam and Blaise spent a lot of their free time, outside the study group of course, working out the spell for Sam’s project. Blaise was quick to redirect him from his original purpose though. “Instead of just revealing whether an animal is an animagus, it would be easier to take things from the premise of revealing its true form.”

“What do you mean?” Sam asked trying to wrap his head around what seemed to him like word play. 

“Well, what you’re proposing is to weed out something specific among a whole range of things, which is immensely complicated and has too many variables that would have to go into the construction, but revealing something’s true form is far easier. It’s just taking away anything extra. Not only that but it can be used for more than just finding an animagus,” Blaise explained. 

“Okay. I think I see what you mean. Maybe a basic truth spell would be a good basis to start researching from?” Sam suggested. 

“That’s just what I was thinking,” Blaise said with a grin. 

Sam didn’t want to bring it up in front of Ron and Harry because there was never any telling when Ron might have his rat with him, and he didn’t want to tip him off. Especially since he was probably already on edge with the whole Sirius Black thing. He knew that Scabbers would disappear at the start of Christmas break and didn’t want to spook him and make him disappear before he was able to put his plan into action. 

Halloween night, after a yet again uneventful feast, Sam found himself stuck in the great hall and a sleeping bag wedged between Blaise and Dean. Dean told him about how Sirius Black apparently tried to break into Gryffindor tower and Sam nearly smacked himself in the head. Of course. He had been so wrapped up in his project to reveal Peter and get Sirius free that he completely forgot that Sirius was trying to do the same thing. 

Sam wasn’t unused to sleeping in difficult conditions and had no trouble dropping off to sleep. Blaise, however, was a different story. He didn’t usually sleep, perfectly able to keep himself occupied and none of his roommates ever noticed or cared, but Sam was a different story. Sam would notice and he didn’t much like the idea of just lying there all night staring at the ceiling, so he decided to try to sleep. It took some time to get used to laying on the floor instead of a nice comfy bed, but he did manage to go to sleep. 

When Sam woke the next morning he was surprised to feel a warm heat next to him. It seemed that somehow in the night he and Blaise and shifted closer together. They were still completely in their own sleeping bags, but were pressed up against each other. He felt better when he looked around the hall and realized that they weren’t the only ones that had ended up much closer than they were when they went to sleep. In fact, judging by the position some people were in, it could have been a lot worse. Sam shifted away, not thinking about how nice it felt, and his movement woke Blaise who blinked at him for a minute before shaking his head with a low chuckle. 

They looked at the clock and realized that it was almost time for their morning run anyway so they got up and started to make their way to their dorms to change. They were met at the door by Professor Dumbledore who tilted his head curiously at them. “You boys are up early,” he said. 

“We always get up this early to go running and get our workout in before breakfast,” Sam said quickly, hoping they weren’t about to get in trouble. So far he had yet to have a single detention, though Dean had gotten a few, and he didn’t want to break his streak. He was relieved when the headmaster just nodded and let them past. 

It was the middle of November before Sam realized that he never told Blaise not to mention his project in front of the others and he was reminded by Blaise suddenly rushing over with a book and an excited exclamation of, “I’ve got it!”

Sam, not yet realizing what he had, asked, “Got what?”

“They key. The thing we were missing for your project to reveal an animagus. It’s this rune here…” he stopped as Ron’s rat streaked out of his pocket rushing for the door and he reached out an snatched it up. “Hey maybe we can test it on him?” he asked nearly bouncing with excitement. He knew exactly what he was doing. He knew why Sam wanted that spell and he knew what the rat was and he was bored waiting for something to happen so he had decided to force the issue. 

What happened next though, he didn’t expect at all. The rat in his hands suddenly shifted into a man and grabbed him around the neck. He had never expected Pettigrew to make a move like this and his surprise had him frozen for a moment. Long enough for the death eater to power up a spell that had electricity arcing from the fingers of the hand that wasn’t securing Blaise. 

Peter didn’t know what else he could do at this point other than kill them all and try to get away with his secret intact. If the blasted boy hadn’t caught him, or even if he hadn’t had such a firm grip on him so that he could get away it might have been different, but he couldn’t let them do that spell on him. There was no telling if it would leave him in any position to fight back afterward. For all he knew it would knock him out while it revealed him. 

Blaise was jolted back into action when he heard Sam cry out, “Blaise!” and he noticed the electrified hand headed for his face and stomped hard on Pettigrew’s instep as he spun away directing an elbow to the back of the man’s neck, knocking him unconscious. 

Sam breathed a sigh of relief as Blaise knocked Pettigrew out and looked around at the others. He noticed that Ron was pretty much stupefied and wouldn’t be any help. Harry looked like he was ready for action but at a loss of what to do. Dean had, of course, taken up position next to Sam the second danger materialized, so Sam turned to Harry and told him to go get a teacher, preferably Dumbledore and bring him here fast before he rushed over to Blaise and pulled him into a crushing hug. 

Sam knew that he was being ridiculous. That Blaise wasn’t even real. But Blaise was his best friend, and he wouldn’t put it past that asshole Gabriel to take him away just because of that. Just like he had tried to take Dean away at Mystery Spot. He knew that he would have to leave Blaise behind after they graduated, but he wasn’t ready yet. He couldn’t lose him right now and oh holy shit. How the hell could he be having feelings for his best friend. Sam quickly let go as that thought hit him and he stepped back hastily, almost tripping over Pettigrew in the process. 

Dean raised an eyebrow at his brother, having caught the look on his face and hoping it didn’t mean what he thought it meant, but resolved to confront Sam about it later. He stepped in and took control of the situation, setting the three of them to guard Pettigrew and make sure he didn’t wake up and take them unawares again. Ron finally managed to collect himself enough to speak…somewhat… “But…Scabbers…he’s…”

“Obviously an animagus form of this guy who tried to kill Blaise and probably would have killed us too,” Dean said impatiently. Dealing with children was all well and good when they were having fun and hanging out, but in a dangerous situation he had very little patience for them. 

“But…”

“If you can’t be helpful, just stay out of the way,” Dean snapped. At least Blaise was being useful and watching the man like a hawk and seemed ready to pounce at the slightest twitch, as did Sam. In fact, Sam looked ready to kill the guy where he lay. 

It wasn’t long before the door opened and in swarmed Professor Dumbledore and Professor McGonagal. They took one look at the man on the ground and put up a containment ward around him and motioned the children over away from him. “What happened here?” Professor McGonagal asked tensely. 

“He’s my rat…or…he was…but then…he was…him…” Ron stammered. 

Blaise rolled his eyes and cut him off before he hurt himself. “I was looking for something to help Sam with his Spellcrafting project and finally found it. When I told him about it, Ron’s rat tried to run away. I grabbed him to keep him from escaping and suggested testing the spell on him and then he turned into a man and grabbed me. He was about to kill me but I broke his hold and knocked him out, then Sam sent Harry to come get you,” Blaise said clearly. 

Dumbledore had a number of questions from that explanation and started with, “And what is your Spellcrafting project?” he asked Sam. 

“It’s a spell to reveal something’s true form,” Sam told him. 

“And did Mr. Pettigrew…the rat…know the purpose of this project?” he asked. 

“Yeah. Blaise had just said it,” Dean joined the conversation. 

“I see. And you say he was about to kill you? How can you be sure of that?” 

“I could see the electricity between his fingers and his hand was coming towards my face. I’m sure it would have killed me if it had hit,” Blaise said firmly, not wanting the headmaster to sweep any of this under the rug. 

“I see,” he said again as he stroked his beard. I don’t see that we have any choice but to call the aurors and question him…about a great many things,” he said thoughtfully. He turned to Professor McGonagal and asked, “Would you mind summoning them here. I will guard Mr. Pettigrew.”

“Yes, headmaster,” she said sweeping from the room to do just that.


	12. Chapter 12

Dumbledore turned to Blaise and asked, “Mr. Zabini. Would you please fetch your head of house and ask him to bring some veritaserum with him?” 

“Yes, sir,” Blaise said rushing from the room. 

Professor McGonagal returned with the aurors at the same time as Blaise returned with Professor Snape and they got down to business. Each of the children were questioned separately and they retold their stories before Madam Bones, the head of the aurors, accepted the veritaserum from Professor Snape and lowered the containment ward long enough to administer it to the unconscious animagus before raising the containment ward again and sending a spell to jolt him awake. 

She wasted no time asking questions. “What is your name?” 

“Peter Pettigrew”

“Are you an illegal animagus?” 

“Yes”

“Were you planning to harm these children?”

“Yes”

“Why?”

“Because they were about to learn my secret.”

“Why were you hiding in your animagus form?”

“Because if anyone saw me alive they would know I tricked them.”

“How did you trick them?” 

“I blew up the street when Sirius confronted me about the Potters and escaped as a rat.”

There was a murmur of voices at that answer and Madam Bones shushed them. “Why did he confront you?”

“Because I was the secret keeper.”

There were more than a few gasps and Bones turned to glare at them before continuing the interrogation. “Did you give their location to Voldemort?”

“Yes.”

“Are you a death eater?” 

“Yes.”

“I think that’s enough for now. We will take him into custody and see about setting up an immediate trial for Sirius Black should he ever be found,” she said not wanting to go into more detail about his crimes as a death eater in front of the children. 

Dumbledore waited until Pettigrew was in custody and out of the building before he sent the kids off to dinner. 

After dinner, Dean abducted Sam and they headed down to the kitchens where they could talk privately. After the house elves served them a second desert and left them alone anyway. “So what’s with you and Blaise?” he asked. 

“What do you mean?” Sam asked unconvincingly. 

“You know exactly what I mean,” Dean asked giving his brother a stern look. 

“We’re friends,” Sam said quickly. 

“Sammy…” Dean said sharply. 

“Ok fine. So I kind of have a thing for him. It’s not like anything will ever happen. First of all, he’s not even real and once we graduate I’m never gonna see him again. Secondly, he’s still just thirteen and I feel like a dirty old man just thinking about it. Third, I don’t even know if he likes guys or me that way.”

“I didn’t know YOU liked guys.”

Sam gave an embarrassed shrug. “I do. Kinda. But I like girls too.”

“So you’re bi?” Dean asked and Sam nodded. “Okay. Don’t know why you never told me, but okay. So let’s look at the situation. First, whether he’s real or not we’re here for the next four and a half years. What’s the harm in seeing what happens? And yeah, he’s thirteen, but in case you haven’t looked in the mirror recently so are you,” Dean told him. 

“Yeah, but I’m not really thirteen…” Sam said as though it should be obvious. 

“And he’s not really REAL, so why does that matter?” Dean asked pointedly. “And as far as not knowing if he likes you like that, sometimes you just gotta take a chance. And I do think you have a chance.”

“You do?” 

“Sure. Dude’s like attached at the hip to you. Even if he doesn’t like you like that I don’t think he’d bail on your friendship. You’re like his only friend here. Well and me, but I’m more of an extension of you so that doesn’t really count,” Dean told him. 

“Still…”

“Just think about it,” Dean told him. He knew that the chances that this would be ‘the one’ for Sam were slim to none and four and a half years would be more than enough to get him out of his system. In the meantime, Sam could have someone to relax and be happy with which was all he ever wanted. And now that Sam realized how he felt it was going to drive him nuts until he did something about it. Then Sam, in turn, would drive Dean nuts and that was something Dean wanted desperately to avoid. 

He couldn’t get his mind off that conversation throughout his workout with Blaise the next morning and often caught himself sneaking peeks at Blaise as they worked out and then chastising himself for it. He knew that Blaise was so good at reading him he would probably notice that something was off, and sure enough he caught his friend giving him a few searching looks over the course of the morning, but didn’t say anything. Hopefully he thought it was just fallout from last night and everything that happened with Pettigrew. 

The headline of the prophet had Sam forgetting all about Blaise for a few minutes as he did a spit take. After all the trouble it had taken to capture Pettigrew, the DMLE let him slip through their fingers. Sam couldn’t believe that he actually escaped. It looked like Voldemort may just rise after all. Sam slammed the paper down in disgust. If there was one good thing about it, the initial interrogation they had done here at Hogwarts was at least enough for them to agree to give Sirius a trial. Sam wondered if he would turn himself in for the opportunity to clear his name. 

In defense that day, Sam noticed that Professor Lupin seemed haunted, but only Sam knew why. He could only imagine what the werewolf was feeling after everything revealed in the paper. He hoped that Professor Dumbledore had taken him aside last night and explained everything so that he wasn’t completely blindsided by it, and judging by the dark circles under the man’s eyes there was a good chance that he had. 

It was only a few days later before there was a headline in the paper that Sirius Black was innocent and had been cleared of all charges and later that day, he was spotted in the castle talking to Dumbledore and Harry disappeared for their afternoon classes. Harry was beaming when they saw him the next day and he told them that he was going to get to live with Sirius. He had to go back to his relatives for three weeks at the end of the year to recharge the wards, then he got to be with Sirius the rest of the summer. They were all happy for their friend. They all knew that he didn’t like his relatives much, but only Sam had any idea how deep it went. 

Sam managed to dodge his feelings for Blaise for the rest of term, despite how closely they had been working together, but Blaise had definitely noticed something different in his behavior. It wasn’t until a few days before Christmas that he’d apparently had enough because he pulled Sam into an empty classroom to confront him. “Okay Sam. What gives?” 

“What do you mean?” Sam asked trying to seem nonchalant about it. 

“You’ve been acting weird around me for over a month now. What’s going on?” 

“It’s nothing,” Sam tried to brush him off and wouldn’t even look at him. 

“It’s not nothing. If it were it would have blown over by now. Look if you don’t want to be friends anymore…”

“That’s not it,” Sam said quickly. 

“Then what is it, Sam. Just tell me,” Sam bit his lip and looked away, but didn’t say anything. Blaise threw up his hands in defeat. “Fine. Have it your way,” he snapped and started to leave, but before he could make it out the door, Sam grabbed him, shoved him against the wall and kissed him. When Sam realized what he’d done he broke off the kiss and started to step away, but a hand on his hip kept him from going very far. “Oh,” Blaise said with a small smile like that explained everything and it really did. 

“Sorry. I just…”

“Don’t be,” Blaise said. He wasn’t really sure how he felt about this development yet, but it wasn’t entirely unwelcome. He leaned forward and pressed another light kiss on Sam’s lips and smirked as he said, “We’re gonna be late for class if we don’t hurry though. We’ll talk later, yeah?” 

“Y-yeah. Okay,” Sam said unable to believe the turn things had taken. Granted nothing had been decided, but it seemed that Blaise wasn’t against the idea of them becoming something more if his reaction was anything to go by. Not that it would stop Sam from overanalyzing every moment for the rest of the day until they got a chance to talk about it. 

Blaise was glad that he didn’t have his next class with Sam or Dean because that meant that he could skip it and try to figure out what he was feeling right now.


	13. Chapter 13

Gabriel went back to the dorm and threw himself on the bed staring at the ceiling as he thought over what just happened. He was never one to turn down a good lay, no matter where it came from, but this wasn’t about a good lay. As far as Sam knew they were only thirteen, so obviously that wasn’t what Sam was after. He was after an actual relationship. Something that Gabriel didn’t do. Hadn’t done in a few thousand years actually. Still, while he was here it wouldn’t hurt anything. It wasn’t like he had other lovers on the side in a school full of children. Was it worth it though?

Sam hated him. Gabriel knew that. If Sam knew who he really was, he would never have even thought about touching him. He probably wouldn’t have ever spoke to him more than absolutely necessary. If Sam ever found out that Blaise was Gabriel, he would be furious. Who said he ever had to find out though? He could just play this out until graduation, then Sam and Dean would be back in the real world and as far as Sam would know, Blaise would cease to exist like the rest of this world. A relationship with Sam would give him something to do in his downtime anyway. Besides, if he rejected the hunter now, he might just lose his only friend in this place. He could see things getting super awkward, even if Sam didn’t intentionally push him away. 

He spent the rest of the morning class period considering all the ways this could go wrong, and ways to minimize the potential damage before he was completely decided that he was going to do this. It would be fun and it wasn’t like Sam wasn’t good looking, at twenty-five or thirteen and he was a lot of fun to be around. More than Gabriel had expected. Yeah. This could work. He made it to his afternoon class and slid into his seat next to Sam, who looked at him with a nervous smile. Blaise just smiled back and reached over and brushed his hand lightly over the back of Sam’s to reassure him as Professor Vector came in and started class. 

Sam was completely on edge the whole time they were in the library studying with Dean, Ron, and Harry. He just needed to get this conversation over with so he knew where he stood and he could actually relax. Like he knew he would, he was overanalyzing every little moment they shared this morning. On the surface, it seemed like Blaise was receptive, but the Slytherin was hard to read in the best of times. He wouldn’t have wanted to just push Sam away, so he might have said something noncommittal so he could have time to think it over and if he did then what did he decide, or did he decide yet. 

Blaise was getting amused at Sam’s behavior, but still had every intention of putting him out of his misery later and when they headed down to the great hall, he leaned over and whispered in Sam’s ear, “Meet me by the lake after dinner.” Sam looked over at him and nodded as they went to their separate tables. Sam didn’t eat much. He didn’t know if he could keep anything down, and as soon as he saw Blaise get up and head out he followed him. Blaise felt Sam behind him, but he was far enough back that he obviously wasn’t trying to get his attention so Blaise ignored it until he got to the edge of the lake when he finally turned back and smiled at Sam as he walked towards him. 

Students were always running around the lake at any given time and Blaise wanted to do this privately so he told Sam to follow him and led him to a large shade tree on the far side of the lake, and far enough away that they could talk privately and not be seen if they sat on the other side of the tree. “So I believe I owe you a talk,” he said with a smirk, not able to resist taking a moment to let Sam get even more nervous. 

“Y-yeah,” Sam said quietly. 

“So I take it by that kiss this morning, that you like me and want to be more than friends?” he asked just to confirm that he understood the situation. It would be a little awkward if he was wrong, but Sam nodded so he continued with what he planned to say. “I like you, Sam. And I’d like to be more than friends too.” He waited until Sam looked at him before he reached over and took his hand. Sam grinned and threaded their fingers together before he leaned over and kissed him sweetly. 

Blaise was still taller than Sam at this point so when he put his arm around him, Sam fit like a glove next to him, and they sat out there just talking, interspersed with random chaste kisses and watched the sunset. Once it was good and dark they were getting ready to head to the castle and Blaise asked, “So are we telling people or keeping it a secret?”

“I’m good with telling people if you are,” Sam said hopefully. He would keep it secret if Blaise wanted to, but he didn’t really want to. 

“Telling people it is then. Probably better to just let them see for themselves and avoid the whole awkward announcement thing though,” Blaise said, reaching over to hold Sam’s hand as they walked back to the castle. 

“Yeah. Sounds like a plan,” Sam said with a grin, squeezing his boyfriend’s hand. By the time the rest of the students left for Christmas a few days later, the whole school knew that Sam and Blaise were an item. Gossip really was fast at Hogwarts, but there weren’t many students staying over break this year, so people would have time to get used to it before they got back. Not that there were any issues with it. It was more like girls gushing at them all the time and talking about how ‘cute’ they were. It was a little annoying and he really hoped it blew over during break. Even Harry left this year, spending the holiday with Sirius, so out of their group it was just Sam, Dean, and Blaise. 

Sam, painfully aware of the fact that Blaise was only thirteen, let him set the pace of the relationship. He had no intention of pushing something that Blaise wasn’t ready for yet, and he didn’t just mean sex. Everything between their chaste little kisses and that step as well. 

It took Blaise a week or two to catch onto that fact, and took steps to rectify at least some of it on Christmas day. After they opened their presents to each other, Blaise kissed Sam, and for the first time deepened the kiss and they had a nice little make-out session. He knew that he couldn’t go any further yet. As much as he wanted to get Sam into bed, their bodies were still only thirteen and going that far would definitely reveal that he wasn’t who he was pretending to be and that would only spell disaster, so he would have to content himself with just kissing for now. 

Sam and Dean realized as the new semester started up that their warding class was easily the hardest one they had. It had been hard before when they were just getting the introduction to wards and how they work during the first semester, but now that they were getting more into detail it was mind-boggling. Even Dean didn’t complain though when he realized that this class could be their most important key to ending the apocalypse. Well, he didn’t complain much. Sam could definitely see why this class wasn’t offered until third year. Not only were the concepts pretty complex, but it required a solid grounding in runes, arithmancy, magical theory, and Spellcrafting to even begin understanding it. The teacher had told them at the very beginning that at least half of them would probably wash out of the class by the end of this year and they could believe it, and both of them were determined not to be one of them. 

Sam stayed after class one day to ask the big question they needed the answer to. “Are there wards that can affect angels and archangels?”

“There are, but you won’t be learning about them until seventh year. They are some of the most complex and demanding wards in existence, and very few people can master even the most basic of them,” he said honestly. 

“Okay. Thanks,” Sam said, now feeling validated for having taken the class in the first place and more determined than ever to excel at it, and pull Dean along with him, kicking and screaming if he had to. They both needed to understand this stuff. 

The rest of their new classes were getting heavier and deeper too. Astronomy had turned beyond just learning how to work the telescopes and the correct way to find and map celestial objects and became more about hands on practice as well as how the position of the stars can affect magic. Of course, studying the stars with Blaise was just as romantic as it was educational, not that he would ever admit that out loud of course. Dean was enjoying divination as it moved beyond just an overview of the different techniques to learning how to use them. They were starting with reading tea leaves, which led to Dean starting to drink tea, much to Sam’s amusement.


	14. Chapter 14

By the time the end of year tests rolled around, Sam and Blaise were a firmly established couple. They still hadn’t gone any further than kissing, though it was a near thing more than once. They were both fourteen now and hormones were kicking in and overriding their good sense, or trying to at least. Sam would have to be careful over the summer when they were essentially unsupervised in the house. 

Sam thought he was prepared for his exam results, but seeing that EE in warding hit him hard. The professor had told them at the very beginning that an EE was about the best they could expect their first year and he’d only ever had a handful of students who made an O their first year, but Sam so hoped to be one of them. His only consolation was that Blaise had also gotten an EE. Dean got an A. The rest of Sam and Blaise’s grades were all Os though so he managed to put it behind him and resolved to work harder next year. Dean would have been reeling about his first A, but he didn’t care nearly as much about grades as Sam did. Harry and Ron were both glad they didn’t take warding after hearing the others talk about it. 

The main subject on the train ride home was about the plans Harry and Sirius had for the summer. Dean told him to make sure and keep in touch while they were at Blaise’s, and Ron said the same. Ron wasn’t allowed to go to the alley by himself, but the others promised to hang out with him there sometimes, and Dean would probably be spending just as much time as usual at Ron’s house, and this time Harry could visit too, so Ron wasn’t completely put out by it. Especially after Harry explained that Sirius wouldn’t let him wander the alley by himself either. 

Sam wasn’t sure why, but going to stay at Blaise’s house as his boyfriend felt a lot different than going to stay as a friend, and he found himself getting a little nervous again. It annoyed him, especially since he knew that there wouldn’t be any issues from any adults. He could still count on one hand the number of times that he’d even laid eyes on Blaise’s father during the two summers they stayed there, and he had never once even acknowledged their presence. Maybe that was part of the problem. He was feeling much more protective of Blaise these days, especially of his feelings. He just hoped he could keep himself from starting something for Blaise’s sake. 

Once they took the floo back to Blaise’s house and put their stuff away, they took what was becoming their annual alley trip for summer clothes and dinner at the Leaky Cauldron before heading home. Dean went out for a moonlit fly, while Sam and Blaise curled up on the couch to watch television, not that much got watched of course. Dean wasn’t in from flying by the time Sam and Blaise were headed to bed. They still got up early to work out, even in the summer so they tended to go to bed earlier than Dean. 

On the days that Dean went over to the Weasley’s, Sam and Blaise had ‘dates’. They went to the alley a few times, but usually it was just leisurely flights followed by picnics at the lake or other similar activities and by the end of the summer Sam realized that he was falling hard for Blaise. This wasn’t just a ‘to kill time while they’re stuck here’ situation anymore. Blaise may not be real, but Sam’s feelings most definitely were and he knew he was screwed. Part of him wanted to end things now before they got any deeper, but he knew it was already too late for that. It was going to kill him either way, so he might as well soak up as much of the happiness as he could before it was gone. That didn’t mean he was going to say anything about his feelings to Blaise yet. He was going to hold off on that for as long as he could manage. 

The last month and a half of summer, the four of them met Harry and Sirius in the alley once a week, and Remus, as he now insisted on being called by the teens, joined them most of the time. Sam was just glad he finally had an excuse not to be dragged to the Weasley’s at all this summer. Ron had never gotten over his attitude about Slytherins and even letting him borrow his broom wasn’t enough to redeem Sam in his eyes from dating a Slytherin, so he wasn’t complaining about not having to deal with Ron during the summer. At least he was still keeping the peace for the sake of his other friendships. Harry didn’t have a problem with it thankfully, and actually liked Blaise. Even Sirius warmed up to him quickly once he realized he wasn’t one of the bad Slytherins which took less than a day. 

Sirius sprung for seats in the top box for Harry and all his friends for the quidditch world cup that summer. Thankfully he told them before Dean went out to buy his own tickets, but Sirius wouldn’t let them pay him back. Even after they told him they had plenty of money. He only replied that so did he and wouldn’t hear another word on the matter so they dropped it. Sam wasn’t sure if the world cup would go like it did last time, the ‘afterparty’ specifically, but no one was hurt at all so he decided he wouldn’t try to interfere and would just let things happen as they happened. 

Sure enough, the death eater’s marched that night, just as they had in the books, only this time Sam, Dean, and Blaise were caught up in the mess along with Harry and Ron and nearly had to dodge spells when the mark went up. It took some fast talking to get Sirius not to take Sam, Dean, and Blaise home personally and explain what happened to Blaise’s father, but they did manage to talk him out of it. 

Before they knew it, they were back on the train for another year. Sam considered the tri-wizard tournament fiasco, but the only way he could think of to stop it would be to stop Harry’s name from going in and he had no idea how to do that. Even if he could stake out the cup the entire time, what was he supposed to do to stop a teacher? In the end, he decided he had to let it play out as before. At least Harry would still have him, Dean, and Blaise on his side when the school turned against him and maybe they could at least try to convince other people that he didn’t put his name in. 

He was pulled out of his musings by Blaise’s elbow to his side. “Whatcha thinkin so hard on Sammykins?” he asked curiously. 

“Nothing really. Just letting my mind wander,” he lied easily. 

“Well since you were zoned out, I got you some pumpkin pasties and chocolate frogs from the trolley,” he said as he handed over the aforementioned candy. 

“Oh. Thanks. Sorry, I didn’t even notice,” Sam said sheepishly. Blaise laughed and gave him a quick kiss to let him know all was forgiven. 

Professor Dumbledore announced the tournament at the feast that night, and Sam could practically see the wheels in Dean’s head turning as he tried to figure out how to enter himself, so he caught his brother’s eye and shook his head, ‘no’. Dean responded with a pleading look and Sam just shook his head more firmly and mouthed, ‘later’. Dean deflated and nodded, but cornered Sam after dinner and asked him why. 

“Well the first task involves getting past a full grown mother dragon and taking what she thinks is one of her eggs. The second one they will stick me at the bottom of the Black Lake for a day and you’ll have an hour to swim out and rescue me, fighting all the creatures in the lake along the way. Finally, you’d get thrown into a maze filled with all manner of creatures including spiders the size of a house. Still wanna enter?”

“Well when you put it like that,” Dean said looking a little green around the gills, not that he would ever admit. “Still. If these kids can do it…”

“No, Dean,” he said firmly and then played the card he hadn’t had to play yet, but was saving for this kind of situation. “As long as things go the way they did in the books, I know what’s going to happen and can try to minimize the damage. You throw a wild card in there, we’re all in the dark.”

“Fine,” Dean said annoyed. Even he could see that Sam had a point. “So there will be damage,” he realized what Sam was saying. 

“Let’s just say, unless I can find a way to stop it, Voldemort will be resurrected at the end of it,” Sam told him. 

“Then I’d say we have work to do.”


	15. Chapter 15

Sam watched Mad-eye Moody for a good long while, but he couldn’t find any evidence of a flask or polyjuice. Of course, Gabriel couldn’t make it easy for him. He just had to change up the villains. It was first year all over again when Quirrell wasn’t the one housing Voldemort. That unfortunately didn’t mean that Moody wasn’t a slave driver. They were learning swords in defense this year, and while they were using wooden practice swords this semester, they still hurt like a bitch when they connected. Thankfully it wasn’t nearly as bad for him and Blaise as for the rest of the class. They worked well together and already had a little practice. Other people were black and blue all over. That didn’t stop them from having to meet the fitness requirements though. He was beginning to understand why students called fourth year the year from hell. 

This year in Magical Beings they were learning about Ghouls and Wendigo’s the first term and sirens, djinns, and crocottas the second term. Wards were getting deeper. They were learning about human repelling wards, those repelling human magic, all humans, specific traits, and so on. These were supposedly the most basic wards there were, and Sam could already feel his head hurting just considering that something could be more complicated. Astronomy wasn’t particularly difficult and was very interesting. Dean was also enjoying Divination which was learning Tarot this semester and scrying next semester, including water, mirror, and crystal balls. Spellcrafting was getting more complicated and in-depth and that and Magical Theory were still Sam’s best classes. He even felt like he was finally getting the hang of the complexities of runes and arithmancy now, thanks to Blaise’s help and seeing them in action in his best classes. Dean was still excelling in potions and herbology and was at or near the top of the class in both. Neither of them particularly enjoyed History, but it was good information, even if it was a little boring. 

Through all this, Sam kept his eye out for anything out of the ordinary or anyone acting out of character or even drinking from a flask or taking potions and came up completely blank. He didn’t dare hope that meant that no one would be putting Harry’s name in the cup, and he was right. All of the champions were the same as in the books, including Harry. When most of the school turned on him, even Ron, Sam made sure that he, Dean, and Blaise still had his back. Thankfully Sam even knew what the tasks would be so it made helping him prepare so much easier. Not that any of them, other than Dean, knew that he knew. He even looked up information on past tournaments to make ‘educated guesses’. 

It took a few weeks, but Harry finally managed to get summoning down pat so that he could summon his broom to the arena, but they also worked on a few other things too, just in case Gabriel decided to change around the tasks as well. Worst case scenario, Harry could use his broom to escape. One thing he was glad about, mostly just because Dean was glad about it, was that in this universe quidditch wasn’t cancelled for the tournament and they even added teams from Beauxbatons and Durmstrang. Dean and Ron were both starters this year, along with Harry and the Weasley twins with a couple girls named Angelina and Alicia as the other chasers alongside Dean. 

When the first task rolled around, Sam, Dean, and Blaise sat together to watch, chewing their nails. Sam was glad to see that at least the tasks hadn’t been changed as Cedric Diggory entered the stadium to face his dragon. Sam watched with a wince as Cedric transfigured a rock into a dog that distracted the dragon for a minute. It wasn’t quite long enough though, because before the sixth year could get away, the dragon turned its attention back to him and he barely managed to make it out of there, ending up with some serious burns. Fleur went out next, and immediately set to charming her dragon to sleep. It was just too bad for her that dragons snore, because a burst of fire set her skirts on fire. Thankfully, she wasn’t injured. Just a little bit singed. Then it was Victor’s turn. Surprising no one, he took a far more heavy-handed approach and started cursing the dragon, focusing on its vulnerable eyes. The dragon, now blinded, stumbled around smashing some of its precious eggs. He couldn’t help but fall for Blaise a little more as the boy muttered about barbarism at the sight of the senseless deaths of infant dragons.

Unfortunately, the fact that the tasks were the same, meant that Harry was faced with the biggest, meanest dragon they had. Even knowing that he succeeded didn’t make the moment any less tense for Sam and he had to bury his face in Blaise’s neck more than once as he couldn’t bear to look as Harry flew better than he ever had before. He was flying for his life this time after all. It wasn’t just in chase of an elusive snitch. It was to avoid teeth and claws and bursts of fire. That was some strong motivation for good flying. Still, it was close. Too close. The dragon almost had him more than once, but in the end, they all made it through in one piece, some a little worse for wear and there was a massive celebration that night in Gryffindor, that Sam and even Blaise were invited to since they had been supporting Harry all along. That invitation, however, came from Harry himself, and they both knew that the other Gryffindors wouldn’t appreciate them being in their common room, Blaise specifically, so they politely declined and had their own moonlit picnic at the lake instead. 

After they ate, they were making out, and somehow ended up lying down, Blaise leaning over Sam and his lips went to Sam’s neck as his hand traveled over his chest and stomach, but not going any lower, as much as it was killing him not to. All was going well until he heard Sam whisper, “I love you, Blaise,” and he froze for a second before taking a deep breath and resting his forehead on Sam’s shoulder. He couldn’t do this. 

Sam realized what he said when Blaise reacted and he quickly sat up and moved away. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have…”

Blaise reached out and grabbed Sam’s hand to keep him from moving any farther away. “No. Sam. It’s not that. It’s just…” He took another deep breath before saying, “I’m not who you think I am.”

“What do you mean? You’re Blaise. I’ve known you since we were eleven…”

Gabriel closed his eyes, not wanting to see what was coming. “I wanted to be able to keep an eye on you and your brother…”

“What are you saying?” Sam said narrowing his eyes as his anger built. 

“When I put you in this world…” That was as far as he got before Sam shoved him to the ground and jumped to his feet. 

“You son of a bitch! So what was all this huh? A good laugh!? Blackmail material?! God, I can’t believe I ever even kissed you! And just…eugh!” Sam said as he turned to storm off. 

“Sam, no,” he said as he reached out to grab Sam’s hand, but Sam just spun around with a perfect right hook to Blaise’s eye. 

“Stay the hell away from me, you bastard,” he spat as he continued storming off, leaving Blaise lying on the ground trying to convince himself that the tears in his eyes were from the punch.


	16. Chapter 16

Gabriel lay there for a few minutes, not even caring to curse himself for making this human body so realistic that he could feel pain and be injured like everyone else. He didn’t stay there for long though before he transported himself to the roof of the astronomy tower, the highest point in the school. He just wanted to be alone and watch the stars while he tried to figure out how everything went so wrong. 

Part of him was tempted to just give up the charade of being a student and attending classes, but if he ever wanted to fix things with Sam he had to be close enough to do so, so he would have to keep going. At least until all hope was lost. By the time he came to that conclusion the sun was peeking over the horizon so he headed down to his and Sam’s normal meeting place for their morning workout for defense, just hoping that Sam cared enough about his grades to show up anyway. He didn’t though, so Gabriel just sat by the lake until breakfast. 

It didn’t take long before the talk of the school was Blaise’s black eye and Sam ignoring him and the rumors abounded. Neither of them were talking about it though. Sam wouldn’t even talk to Dean. He couldn’t bear to tell his brother that he had been dating Gabriel of all people for almost a year. That he had actually fallen for Gabriel. Or at least, who Gabriel had been pretending to be. He didn’t know why he was surprised. It was just like the archangel to give him someone to love, and then when he was well and truly hooked, just snatch it away like it was some big joke. Then he has to keep showing up and rubbing Sam’s nose in it with his very presence. 

After breakfast, Professor Snape tried to give Blaise detention for not being in the dorms last night, but he just waved a hand absentmindedly and made the acerbic professor forget all about the incident. It was Sunday so there were no classes, and Sam spent the entire day dodging him. It was almost dinnertime when Blaise, looking for Sam, found himself cornered by Dean and shoved into the wall. “What the hell did you do to him?” he hissed angrily. 

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Blaise said trying to push away, but Dean had too firm a grip. He wouldn’t be able to get away unless he threw some of his angelic strength in there and if Sam hadn’t told Dean who he was yet, he definitely didn’t want to spill those beans. If Dean found out before he won Sam back over, then he had already lost. 

“I don’t give a fuck if you wanna talk or not. You did something to my brother and I want to know what it was.”

Gabriel sighed and decided to give Dean something or he would never get out of this. “I told him my biggest secret and he didn’t take it well. He completely misunderstood what it meant, and now he won’t even talk to me so I can explain.”

“What secret?” Dean asked suspiciously. 

“None of your business,” he snapped. It wouldn’t be overly suspicious not to tell Dean anyway if it had taken almost a year of dating and over four years of friendship for him to tell Sam. 

“So it’s all a misunderstanding?” Dean asked skeptically. 

“Yeah. Mostly,” he said with a shrug as Dean loosened his grip. 

Dean narrowed his eyes as though he were trying to read the Slytherin. “I’ll try to get him to at least hear you out, but I make no promises,” he offered. He could see how upset and hurt his brother had been all day, and he wanted to fix it, and if it really was a misunderstanding, then maybe he could. 

“I appreciate it, but don’t push him,” Gabriel told him. The last thing he needed was for Dean to start pushing too hard and Sam to snap and tell him the truth. 

Once again, the next morning, Sam didn’t show up for their workout, and Blaise just sat at the lake for two hours until it was time for breakfast. When he saw Sam glaring at him, he gave him what he hoped was an apologetic smile and mouthed, ‘talk?’ Sam’s glare just intensified as he looked away. When Blaise walked into defense that morning he saw Sam talking to Professor Moody and the grisled man just shaking his head until Sam stomped over to the wall and glared at Blaise some more, and he guessed that Sam was trying to switch partners. 

Unfortunately, Blaise didn’t have time to talk to him between then and the time that class started, and Sam definitely had no mercy on him as he went at him with his wooden sword like a madman. Blaise was covered in bruises by the end of class, and this time he did have the presence of mind to curse himself for making such a perfectly human body. He was tempted to force the issue, but decided to give Dean a little time to work on him and Sam a little more time to calm down. He didn’t think the hunter would take it well if he did so. Especially now. He did use a little of his mojo to make sure none of the teachers would let him switch partners though. 

It was the next Sunday afternoon when he once again found himself slammed against a wall and he couldn’t help but wince at the pain it caused in his still horrid bruises from Monday’s defense class. “Oh save it,” Sam snapped seeing the wince. “Stop with the sympathy bullshit. Stop pretending to be a student. Stop following me around. And I don’t know what line of crap you fed my brother, but stay the hell away from him too,” Sam said hatefully, shoving him one more time before storming off. 

Gabriel sighed heavily as he watched Sam walk away. It looked like he wasn’t going to calm down. He was going to have to force the issue after all. He would wait until tomorrow morning though. At least give Sam the night to stop seething. 

The next morning, when Sam still didn’t show up to their workout, Gabriel went into an unused classroom and snapped his fingers, causing Sam to appear, still in his pajamas, wiping the sleep out of his eyes. Before Sam could start yelling, Gabriel said in a tone that invited no argument, “It’s your turn to shut up and listen for a minute. Hear me out, then if you want me to disappear you won’t lay eyes on me again. In any form. Got it?”

Sam glared and him and said, “Fine. Talk.” If this was what it took to get rid of him, then he would listen. 

“When I stuck you and your brother here, I became a student so I could keep an eye on you. Then you became my friend and I realized that you were nothing like I expected…”

“What did you expect?” Sam couldn’t help but ask. 

“I expected you to be just like Lucifer. You were supposed to be just like Lucifer,” Gabriel said sadly. 

“What do you mean, supposed to be?” Sam asked annoyed. 

“They have been yanking your chains your whole life to make you just like him. The angels and the demons,” Gabriel explained. 

“So that’s why you did the whole Mystery Spot thing? Because you thought I was like Lucifer?” Sam asked incredulously. 

“No. It’s not WHY I did it. I did it so I could teach you to let go of your brother before you went all vengeance on Lilith and released Lucifer. Thinking you were like him just helped me not to feel so guilty about it.” 

“THAT’S what Mystery Spot was all about?!” Sam exclaimed as some of the puzzle pieces started to fall into place. “Why the hell wouldn’t you just tell me that?!”

“A monster telling you not to kill a demon because it would start the apocalypse? Like you would have believed me,” Gabriel scoffed. 

Sam couldn’t really refute that so he turned the conversation back to where they got off track. “So you finally realized I wasn’t like Lucifer…”

“Yeah and I started to like you, and your brother who wasn’t quite as much like Michael as he was supposed to be either. Neither of them would have been able to see the advantages of this situation and just would have fought it every step of the way.”

“Which is why you made yourself a student to keep an eye on us,” Sam said as he started to understand, but not softening much at all. 

“Yeah. And then when you kissed me that day, it caught me off guard, but I decided that it would be nice to have some companionship while we’re stuck here, and there was no reason you ever needed to know who I really was. We could just enjoy what we had and then Blaise could disappear along with the rest of this world and we could just go back to our lives like it never happened.”

“But you told me. You told me who you were. Why?” Sam asked suspiciously. 

“Because…I never…never expected to…to…” Gabriel found himself stammering. He knew he needed to say this. He knew he needed to get it out if he ever wanted to have another shot with Sam, but the words wouldn’t come. 

“Never expected to what?” 

Gabriel took a deep breath and tried again, looking away so he wouldn’t have to see Sam’s reaction. “I never expected to…to fall in love with you.”


	17. Chapter 17

Sam sucked in a sharp breath at the archangel’s admission. He was struck even more by the fact that for the first time he could read him like an open book. It was like he had just let all of his masks and facades fall away. He was completely baring himself to Sam and he felt his anger just falling away. Still. “I…I need some time to think,” he stammered. 

“Okay. I’ll stop pushing things,” Gabriel said shakily. “Classes will be just about the work…unless you’d rather I have a ‘family emergency’ and have to leave school for a little while…”

Sam considered the idea of working with Gabriel every day while he was trying to sort out his feelings and, while he could see that it would hurt Gabriel immensely, he had to admit, he liked the second option better. “Yeah. Family emergency would probably be best,” he said apologetically. 

“Okay. Just pray for me if you wanna talk,” Gabriel said as he started to walk out of the room. 

Sam reached out and grabbed his wrist before he could get too far, but forgot what he was about to say when Gabriel winced. Sam tilted his head curiously and rolled up Gabriel’s sleeve to see a large purple bruise the right size to be from Sam’s practice sword. “What…but…you’re an archangel…”

“I didn’t want to draw attention by being more resilient than the average student, so this body is fully human and subject to all its frailties,” he explained. 

“I’m…”

“Don’t. It’s all good, Sammykins,” Gabriel cut off his apology and just wanted to get out of there before he lost the battle with his tears. He gently pulled Sam’s hand off his wrist and walked out, leaving a speechless hunter behind. 

Sam just plopped into the chair nearest him as his mind went a million directions. Between Gabriel’s confession of his feelings, learning that Gabriel had been his best friend for years, his real reasons for Mystery Spot, the fact that the angels and demons have been manipulating him his whole life, the fact that he had honestly hurt Gabriel, not just emotionally, but physically too, and trying to reconcile Gabriel with ‘Blaise’ he wasn’t really sure which way was up anymore. 

Blaise was funny and kind. He was open and considerate of Sam’s feelings…of everyone’s feelings. He always had a kind word for everyone, unless they were being jerks. He helped to tutor people who were struggling in subjects, Sam in particular, but he had helped Dean and Harry plenty of times too. Blaise thought the loss of baby dragons was barbaric and valued life. Blaise was his best friend, and the boy he was in love with. 

Gabriel was the cruel, selfish, cold, vindictive monster that tortured him for a year in Mystery Spot by making his brother die and come back to life every day before dying for, what Sam thought, was for good. Made Sam beg to get him back. Gabriel was the trickster who played with his victims before killing them, or worse, just traumatizing them for life. Gabriel was the callous archangel who cared more for family squabbled than saving the world. But was he wrong about all of that? Was Gabriel more than he appeared?

Mystery Spot was to teach him to let go so he didn’t start the apocalypse. Now that he knew that, it made sense. What Sam saw was cruelty and selfishness may have just been desperation and fear. He didn’t want one of his brothers to die. He was trying to stop it the only way he could think of. Now that he was looking back on it with fresh eyes, Gabriel didn’t seem to enjoy Sam’s begging and had even tried to reason with him. To get him to learn his lesson. Knowing him as Blaise, Sam had to wonder now what his ‘victims’ had done to deserve it. How could the sweet boy who valued life so highly kill anyone who didn’t truly deserve it. He remembered how Gabriel had said that they ‘got what was coming to them’ and were ‘hoisted on their own petards’. Maybe there was more to that story than they knew. 

As far as being callous and not caring about saving the world…they were here weren’t they? In TVLand he had been trying to get them to say yes because he didn’t think there was another way. Was he just trying to limit the damage that Lucifer was able to do in the meantime while they kept resisting? Or did he just want to get it over with for other reasons? When they pushed the matter though, he brought them here. Gave them a chance to find another way. A way that he couldn’t find. Maybe he really COULDN’T save the world. He was still giving them a chance to. But he must already know everything here. What could he expect them to find that he couldn’t? 

He sat there in that empty classroom until he realized that he was about to be late for defense. He had completely missed breakfast. He rushed to class and made it just in the nick of time to find Professor Moody looking appraisingly at him. “Since your partner had to leave the school, you get to pair with me this class,” he said with a grin that Sam didn’t find the slightest bit reassuring. Maybe he should have asked Gabriel to wait until after defense to leave. 

The rest of the classes he usually partnered with Blaise in, weren’t strictly necessary to have a partner, so he had no problem working by himself. He was very distracted though as his mind went over and over everything he’d learned and everything he now suspected and all the questions that he now had. Dean gave him until Thursday afternoon before he called him on it. They were in the library studying with Harry and Ron, who had finally made up with Harry after the first task, when Dean snapped, “Come on, Sam. You’re usually the one on us about homework and studying. What’s with you lately?” 

Sam snapped out of his thoughts and looked over to see that Dean and Harry both looked concerned, not that Ron seemed to care much. “It’s nothing,” he said quickly. Too quickly. Dean narrowed his eyes at him and Sam shook his head slightly letting him know that now wasn’t the time. He knew that Dean would corner him after dinner and then he was even more distracted trying to figure out what and how much to tell him. 

Sure enough, Dean dragged him off after dinner and said, “Ok. What gives?” 

Sam couldn’t think of a better way to do this so decided to just rip off the bandaid and get it over with. “Blaise is Gabriel.”

Dean blinked at him for a moment before he said carefully, “Okay…that makes sense.”

“It does?” Sam asked incredulously. 

“Well yeah. I mean he’d want to keep an eye on us and all. I had figured he was posing as one of the teachers, but a student makes more sense. He would get to see us more and we would actually talk to him about stuff,” Dean said with a shrug. He felt like he was trying to walk on eggshells here. He wasn’t sure exactly how Sam felt about any of this and didn’t want to set him off. He’d seemed less angry this week and Blaise was gone for some family emergency that just reeked of a cover story, so he guessed that he’d gotten Sam to hear him out. 

“So, you’re okay with the fact that he pretended to be our friend, and my boyfriend?” 

“Well it depends on how you define pretended. I mean, he is…was…our friend and your boyfriend. The only thing he pretended was being a student, which we basically are too, and his name and appearance. It doesn’t change the fact that he’s partnered with us in classes, helped with our homework, and all the fun stuff we did together. I mean, I figured when you were all gung ho about taking the ‘incredible opportunity’ we were offered here that you stopped really hating the guy. I mean, I can see why it would be a bit of a shock, of course, but still. And as far as the boyfriend thing, he obviously genuinely cares about you. Is it really so unforgivable?” 

“I…I don’t…”

“Look, Sammy, you know I’ll back your play whatever you decide, but I think you should cut the guy some slack. He’s trying. I mean yeah, some of the crap he’s put us through in the past is pretty shitty, but at least he’s making an effort now.”

“He said Mystery Spot was to try and make me let go so I wouldn’t kill Lilith and set Lucifer free,” Sam admitted. 

Dean didn’t have nearly as much baggage with that incident as Sam did, given the fact that he couldn’t actually remember any of it, but he knew that it still haunted Sam. “Maybe there are other good reasons for everything else he did too,” Dean suggested. Sam just shrugged. He’d been wondering the same things. “So that’s what’s had you all zoned out all week?” Dean asked, making sure there wasn’t anything more he was missing. 

“Pretty much,” Sam said. 

“His family emergency…is he coming back from it?” 

“I told him I needed some time to think.”

“And?” 

“I don’t know yet.”

“Well figure it out. Preferably before you fall too far behind in classes. And try to pay better attention. How can you help me understand stuff if you aren’t paying attention?” Dean said with a grin and was rewarded with a chuckle from Sam. 

Dean had given Sam a lot more to think about, and he knew he couldn’t take too much longer to do so.


	18. Chapter 18

By Sunday, Sam felt like he couldn’t put it off anymore. He had too many questions for Gabriel that he needed answers to before he could come to any firm conclusions. He told his brother he would be incommunicado for the day and found an empty classroom and prayed for Gabriel who appeared a moment later, still looking like Blaise. Sam didn’t even give him a chance to talk before he started peppering him with question. “The people you killed at that college in Ohio…” 

“Didn’t have enough human left to be considered people,” he said clearly. 

“How so?” Sam asked tilting his head to the side curiously. 

“Their souls were so shriveled and blackened from the atrocities they’d commited, they couldn’t even be considered human. The professor who raped his students and then bullied them into suicide if they threatened to tell and the researcher who did far more torture than research and not just on animals either. The college kid was headed that way but still had a chance, so he just got taught a lesson,” Gabriel explained. 

“When you were trying to make us get the apocalypse over with, was that so that Lucifer couldn’t do as much damage in the meantime or was there another reason?” Sam asked curiously. 

“That may have been part of it, but mostly I just couldn’t stand dragging it out anymore. Seeing my brothers like that, knowing that half the world was about to die along with one of them and just waiting for the axe to fall…it was killing me,” Gabriel told him. He liked the noble reason Sam had come up with, but he had no intention of lying to him here. 

“You said you were giving us a chance to find a way to stop it by being here and learning all this, but you must already know all this,” Sam paused to give Gabriel a chance to respond and he nodded, having an idea where Sam was going with this but wanting to hear him ask the question. “What do you expect us to figure out that you can’t?”

“Angels aren’t like humans. We can’t make great intuitive leaps like you can. Critical thinking and creativity isn’t really in our wheelhouse. Archangels are a little better with that stuff than the rank and file, but still nowhere near the least of humanity. Basically, we have the knowledge, but can’t do much with it. You have the tools to use it, but not the knowledge. I figure if we can put them both together, maybe we can figure out what I can’t alone.”

“That’s why you were reading the weekly world news,” Sam said as if a light bulb went off in his head. 

“Bingo. I could never think up that kind of stuff myself, so I use human creativity for it.”

Sam considered all that and now everything was starting to make sense. “How much of Blaise was just an act?” 

“Not much,” Gabriel said with a shrug. “I pretended to not know everything already and let you and others pull ahead in some classes so I didn’t draw too much attention. I pretended to do homework that I really just snapped up already completed. That’s about it really.”

“So the personality, the helpfulness, the…the feelings…that’s all you?” Sam asked as he started to make a decision. 

“Yep,” Gabriel said shifting uncomfortably. He had let himself relax and be himself here. He didn’t usually let people so close. Especially humans, but he had never intended on them knowing who he was so he hadn’t expected it to matter. 

“And when you said you were in love with me…you meant it?” Sam asked hopefully. It had been all Gabriel could do to form words the first time he said it. Now, all he could do was nod, still not looking at Sam and thus not realizing how close he was until he felt a finger under his chin, lifting his head and then Sam’s warm lips on his and he melted into the kiss. When it ended, Sam didn’t go far, still resting his forehead against Gabriel’s. “I love you…Gabriel, but no more lies. No more pretending,” he said firmly. 

“I can still pretend to be Blaise until we leave here though right? I like going to class with you and all,” Gabriel asked hopefully. 

“That’s fine. I meant no more pretending with me. I know you now. So does Dean, by the way.”

Gabriel groaned. “Does that mean I can be expecting him to get his hands on some holy oil?” he asked wryly. 

“Nah. He’s good with it. He figured you were here somewhere. He just had you pegged as one of the teachers instead of a student. Once he found out who you were he was kicking himself for not figuring it out sooner,” Sam said with a chuckle. 

“Well will wonders never cease,” Gabriel joked. “Your brother doesn’t want to kill me for once.”

Sam grinned evilly and kissed Gabriel again quickly before pulling away. “He’s not the brother you’ll have to worry about if you lie to me again,” he said in mock sweetness. 

“Understood,” Gabriel said with a nod as he pulled Sam back to him and kissed him desperately. 

When they broke for air, Sam grabbed Gabriel’s hand and started pulling him along. Gabriel chuckled and went along with, curious as to where Sam was taking them. It didn’t take him long to figure it out though as they headed for the lake and Sam led them to ‘their spot’ behind the tree and pinned him to it, kissing him again before he said, “Now let’s have a little talk about this world,” Sam said. 

“You’re not gonna try to convince me to let you go again are you?”

“No. I get what you’re doing here and I do appreciate it. Even when I hated you I still appreciated it. I’m good with graduating before being shoved back into the mess,” Sam told him. 

“So you want to stay here longer?” Gabriel asked confused as to where Sam was going with this. 

“No. We can’t take forever off. I mean, just regular things about while we’re here. For example, do we really have to follow the books? This whole tournament thing for example is very distracting, and if we go by the books and Voldemort is resurrected at the end it will be even more so.”

“Yes, but the tournament is teaching you to use what you’re learning to solve problems and put it into practice outside the classroom. Besides, I’m not really doing all this really. I mean, I COULD change it if I wanted to, like how I changed the classes around to reflect real magic and made the menu adjustments you asked for, but for the most part I just set things in motion. How they unfold isn’t really up to me. It’s too much work for me to bother running an entire world.”

“So Voldemort…”

“Won’t really affect the school at all. If I remember correctly, even in the books he didn’t have much to do with the school until what would be your seventh year, and you should already know that I’ll make sure you have adequate teachers. Especially in your last year when you’ll be covering angels and archangels.”

“So no Umbrige next year?” Sam asked hopefully. 

“No Umbrige. I already have a teacher planned for next year that I think you’ll really enjoy,” Gabriel said with a grin.

“Who?” 

“It’s a surprise,” he said cryptically. When Sam raised a skeptical eyebrow, he said, “A good one. I promise.”

“Okay fine,” Sam said rolling his eyes. “Next point…room of requirement.”

“I thought it just made things too convenient so I left it out,” Gabriel said with a shrug. He should have expected that Sam would go looking for it. 

“True…but if it were there we could have a private place just for us,” Sam said seductively while nibbling on Gabriel’s ear. “You could even rig it so that we could be our normal selves inside,” he gave a little suck to the archangel’s neck. “I mean, I can hardly sleep with you in a fourteen year old body, can I?” 

“I-it’s t-there now,” Gabriel said breathlessly. 

“Then why are we still here?” Sam asked pressing himself tighter against Gabriel and the next thing he knew they were in a large bedroom, and back to their usual selves with Sam towering over Gabriel. “Much better,” he whispered lifting Gabriel up and carrying him over to the bed.


	19. Chapter 19

Sam and Gabriel lay tangled on the bed catching their breath and Sam leaned down to kiss Gabriel deeply. “I love you Gabe,” he whispered. 

“I love you too, Sam,” Gabriel whispered back. 

“We shouldn’t do this often though,” Sam said sadly. 

“Why not?” Gabriel asked disappointed. 

“Going back and forth from kid to adult is very…disconcerting…for me,” Sam told him. 

“How come?” Gabriel asked confused. As someone who changed form on a whim whenever he felt like it, he didn’t really understand. 

 

“Well…I just…I can’t really explain. It’s like, I get used to myself one way and then I’m completely different. It’s just…weird. I don’t like it. But I do like this,” he said pulling Gabriel tighter against him as if to show what he meant. “So I don’t want to give it up completely, but maybe just every once in a while. It won’t be too much longer before our other bodies mature enough that we won’t have to do this anyway,” Sam told him. 

Gabriel just nodded. “Okay. If that’s what you want.” It wasn’t like Gabriel was going to push Sam to do something he didn’t want to do. Not regarding sex anyway. He did wish he could get some more than ‘once in a while’ though. “We can stay like this for a little while though right? I mean, we don’t have to go back right away?” 

“No. We can hang here until lunch,” Sam said with a grin. They still had a few hours until lunch and there was plenty they could do in the meantime. 

By dinnertime, they were once again the talk of the school as everyone realized that they were back together. Sam couldn’t help but roll his eyes at all the gossip. They easily settled back into their normal routine and life went on as normal until the second task. He and Blaise headed down to the stands, but couldn’t find Dean anywhere. It wasn’t until Ron came over to them looking for him too that Sam realized what was going on. “Shit!” he said, pulling Gabriel to the side. “What did you do?” he asked heatedly. 

“I didn’t do anything. I told you, I don’t control the story. I just set the original parameters,” Gabriel protested. 

Sam remembered that now and he was kicking himself for not realizing what was going to happen ahead of time and thinking everything was going to follow the books. This time around, Dean had slid into the position of Harry’s best friend and Ron was mostly just a hanger on. Especially since Harry moved in with Sirius. It made sense that Dean would end up in the lake instead of Ron. “Fix it!” Sam ordered. 

“It would be far easier for me to add my own safeguards on your brother to make sure he’s fine than it would be for me to modify all the necessary memories and turn back the clock to switch him with someone else,” Gabriel said hoping that making sure he was safe would be good enough for Sam. 

“Fine, but I swear Gabriel, if one hair on his head is harmed…if he even catches a cold…”

“I got it, Sam. He will be perfectly fine. I’ll make sure of it,” he assured him. Sam nodded tersely and they went to take their seats and Sam was even more on edge this time then he had been watching Harry fight the dragon. This task was suddenly very real. He did trust Gabriel and he knew that Harry had the spells down pat, but until he knew for sure he wouldn’t be able to relax in the slightest. 

It seemed like forever for Sam before Harry and Dean broke to the surface and Sam could see the momentary panic on Dean’s face before he realized where he was and what he was doing. It wasn’t until he was safely on the dock wrapped in a heated blanket that Sam breathed a sigh of relief and bolted from the stands, followed closely by Gabriel, headed down to meet them. Gabriel reached out a hand for Dean to shake. 

Dean looked at Gabriel’s outstretched hand curiously, but reached out to shake it anyway and felt a wave of relief as he was suddenly warm again. He supposed that Gabriel couldn’t dry him off without it being suspicious, but he gave him a grateful look anyway. Hopefully Gabriel had healed him too so he wouldn’t catch pneumonia. Whoever thought swimming in a lake in Scotland in February was a good idea should be shot. Hell, if he had his gun he’d have done it himself. 

The quidditch season finished off not long after the second task. Gryffindor won the house cup for Hogwarts, and Durmstrang won the interschool competition, if only barely. All the quidditch celebrations brought to mind something else Sam wanted to ask Gabriel. “So I know that quidditch isn’t really real, but flying brooms?”

“Yes and no. It is perfectly possibly to enchant a broom to fly, but no one really bothers anymore. If you plan to use your brooms when you go back I would definitely look into weaving an invisibility spell into it so you don’t scare people to death,” Gabriel told him. 

“So, we will get to keep all the stuff we got here?” Sam asked. He hadn’t asked until now because it was still a few years away so it wasn’t something that was on his mind regularly, but since Gabriel brought it up. 

“Well except for the gold in the bank and that enchanted diary, yes,” Gabriel told him. “That’s why I made sure you would have access to all the best books possible in the bookstore, and the best weapons and so on.”

“Even the philosopher’s stone? Does it really work?” Sam asked. 

“Yes and Yes,” Gabriel said with a grin. “You won’t actually be able to make the elixir of life since some of the ingredients are extinct, even in this world, but you can make plenty of gold. Just make sure you don’t flood the market.”

Sam grabbed him in a bruising kiss. “You’re the best.”

“I wanted you to have every chance. Especially now. I don’t think I could bear to lose you if you can’t find a way out of the apocalypse,” Gabriel said honestly. 

“You play with time a lot. Can’t you just…I don’t know, send us back in time to do it differently or something?” Sam asked curiously. 

“I would if I could, but I can only truly effect time within dimensions of my own creation. That’s why I had to move you to a different dimension to teach you so that I could pull us outside of time. The real world…that belongs to my father, and has hard and fast rules that even I can’t break.”

“Oh. I guess that makes sense. That’s why Dean couldn’t stop Mom from making the deal with yellow-eyes,” Sam guessed. Gabriel raised an eyebrow in surprise so Sam told him the story. 

“Yeah. That would be why. Cassie really should have known better. It’s one of the more immutable laws of the universe.”

“We’ll find a way, Gabe. Between the three of us, we’ll figure it out. I promise,” Sam assured him. 

“I hope you’re right, Sammy. I really do.”

The remainder of the time before the third task was spent with them all drilling Harry relentlessly on battle spells and in defense. Sam had to admit that Gabriel had a point in that all this was teaching them how to use magic in real world situations. Sam had stopped thinking of it as a novelty and started thinking of it as another tool, just like their guns and blades and salt and iron. If they could manage to get through this whole apocalypse thing, they would probably be the best hunters on the planet. They would even have Bobby beat in knowledge. The old man would be salivating over their library at the very least when they got back. 

The third task went much like Sam expected it would, except that Cedric didn’t take the cup with Harry. It seemed that Gabriel was against unnecessary death, even in a fiction world. Harry won and Voldemort was resurrected. At least Harry had Sirius now to fight for him against the ministry and the press. They wouldn’t be running a hatchet job on him with Sirius Black in his corner. He’d already stopped more than a few attempts during the tournament. 

Harry was glad that he didn’t have to take the end of year exams, but that didn’t save the rest of them. Sam managed to get his hoped for O in warding this time and managed to keep Os in all his other classes. Dean brought his warding grade up to a low EE and, as usual got a good mixture of Os and EEs. Gabriel of course got straight Os along with Sam. Ron, though, suffered from spending most of the first semester pissed at Harry and not studying with them. He got mostly As with only one EE in herbology and even failed history completely.


	20. Chapter 20

Dean was surprised to find that even knowing that Blaise was Gabriel, he wasn’t overly tempted to make demands for changes to this world or special treatment. He was beginning to realize the value of relaxation; of being able to take some time away from fighting for your life and having the weight of the world on your shoulders. This peacefulness was starting to grow on him, as was Gabriel who was practically another brother to him now. He did, though, have one demand, just a small one, that he laid out almost the second they got to Blaise’s/Gabriel’s house after they got off the train. “Ok, so I can live with being stuck as a fifteen year old, but I at least want a damn beer.”

Gabriel laughed heartily and shook his head. “In the fridge.”

“Thank you,” Dean said with a curt nod and headed that way. Their summer didn’t change much from the previous summers, despite not having to pretend anymore. They were still taking as much advantage as possible of their second childhood. Dean spent time at Ron’s and they went to the alley regularly, often meeting Harry and Sirius there, Sam and Gabriel went on leisurely flights and had picnics and went on dates as they got even closer than they had been when Sam thought he was Blaise. 

When their booklists came at the start of August Sam groaned. “Do we really have to take OWLs?” he whined. 

“Why, Sammykins, you wouldn’t want special treatment would you? How else will we know if you’re learning anything without the standardized tests,” Gabriel said mischievously. 

“You’re evil, you know that,” Sam pouted. “Seriously, sadistically, evil.” 

“What are OWLs?” Dean asked curiously. 

“Ordinary Wizarding Levels,” Sam told him. “Think SATs on steroids.” 

“Shit.”

“You’re helping us study,” Sam ordered his boyfriend.

“What do you think I’ve been doing the last four years,” Gabriel said, rolling his eyes. “You really think I’m planning to just toss you in the deep end now?”

“Yes,” Dean said without hesitation, before dodging the pillow Gabriel threw at him. 

When they climbed back on the train for the start of their fifth year, Sam turned back to a subject that he’d ignored for most of the summer and asked, “So who’s the defense teacher this year?” 

“You’ll just have to wait and see,” Gabriel said with a smirk. 

“Wait and see what?” Harry asked as he and Ron found them. 

“Who the defense teacher will be this year,” Dean told them. 

“I don’t know. I just wish Remus would come back,” Harry said petulantly. “I hate Snape.”

“You know the board of governors won’t let him come back now that they know he’s a werewolf,” Gabriel said sadly. “As stupid as it is. He’s the best teacher we had.”

“Moody wasn’t too bad,” Ron added, never having gotten over his awe of the old auror. 

“Are you kidding? How many students did he curse after they startled him?” Sam asked incredulously. The man was beyond paranoid and tended to curse before he looked. Even in a school full of children.

“Nothing Madam Pomphrey couldn’t fix,” Ron defended his hero. 

“It doesn’t matter now, since he’s not coming back,” Dean said quickly, taking the rare position of peacemaker and signaling an end to that particular conversation. 

When they got to the great hall for the welcoming feast though, Sam looked over the head table and broke out in a grin, looking over to Gabriel who had been waiting for his reaction and got two thumbs up, just as Professor Dumbledore introduced, “And your new defense teacher, Professor Sirius Black.” They were supposed to be learning daggers, knives, and throwing this year in defense and supposedly those were Sirius’ specialties so this would be an awesome year. 

The first term of Magical Beings this year would be focusing on the rarer magical beings like Fairies, Kitsune, Rakshasa, Vetala, and Baku. Second term would be a brief overview of extinct magical beings like Leviathan, dragons, phoenixes, lamias, and touching on the idea of Alphas. Warding this year was focusing on warding against magical beings and this was where all those years of that class would come in handy. You have to know exactly what you are warding against after all or it will never work, so every bit of information about their physiology, abilities, and sometimes even their origins would come in handy. Even as useful as all this was, Sam and Dean were both rather impatient to get through this year because next year was when the real work started. Sixth year was all about demons and seventh year was all about angels and archangels. Not to mention that was when they started working on more complex spell constructs in spellcasting and deeper threads in magical theory. They would at least be starting on Enochian this year in runes though. The first two years were spent on Norse runes, the next two on celtic runes, and the last three were focusing on Enochian. They could also start taking advanced latin next year to supplement what they were already learning in their other classes which was more of a streamlined look at the language. Sam definitely planned on taking it, but he was still trying to talk Dean around. 

Surprisingly enough, for Dean at least, Sam pulled ahead big time in defense this year. He seemed to have a real knack for throwing weapons and smaller blades. As much of a hard time as he gave him about wussy fighting, he was still jealous. Hitting a bullseye from across a field with a hatchet just looked cool. Another point of contention for Dean, who until this point had always been able to best Sam with swords at least, was that Sam had finally hit his late growth spurt and his extra height and strength and reach, had him quickly catching up to his brother in skill. Dean contented himself with the fact that next year he would be in the lead. They would be doing archery next year and they learned when they were kids the first time, that Sam flat out sucked at archery. Okay, maybe not truly sucked, but he didn’t have nearly the knack for it that Dean did. 

Sam managed to talk Gabriel into teaching him the spoken form of Enochian as they learned the runes. Thankfully they had that class together this year so Gabriel just whispered the words as they worked with the runes. Gabriel explained that no one outside of the angels had heard the spoken form of Enochian since Moses, so he would need to keep it to himself that he knew it. Gabriel watched concerned as Sam pushed himself too hard to learn anything and everything and resolved to convince him to drop astronomy next year. It was useful, yes, but it wasn’t crucial. Not like some of the other things, and if Sam was dead set on advanced Latin, and learning Enochian more fully, not to mention all the extra effort he put into the other classes, something would have to go. He had no doubt the hunter would pass his OWLs with flying colors and be able to continue all his current classes next year. He comforted himself with the fact that next year, all the houses would be in class together for all the classes they were taking, so he would have Dean as backup in most classes to keep Sam from pushing himself too hard. 

It seemed like no time at all before the end of the year was upon them and with it, the OWL exams. Sam was a bundle of nerves, despite Gabriel assuring him multiple times that he had all this down. Dean was better at hiding his nerves, but he too wanted to prove something here, and after all the work he had put in, he wanted something to show for it. Gabriel had made it clear that he wasn’t going to pad their grades. He had, of course, added that he wouldn’t need to, but neither of them heard that part. On the surface though, Dean was cool as could be. He couldn’t have Sam thinking he was turning into a geek too. 

Harry had been pretty moody all year, and the added stress of the tests really did a number on him. At least it was the last exam that he flew off the handle on, which happened to be history. Thankfully, Sirius was nearby and took him out of there. Dean gave him a sympathetic look. He could definitely see losing it with all this crap. He was almost there himself after five straight days of grueling tests. Sam though, watched with a little more trepidation. He wondered if Voldemort was sending him visions again. At least Sirius was here and Harry could see with his own eyes that he was fine. That should, at least, minimize the risks of the whole Department of Mysteries thing happening again. It didn’t stop Sam’s mind from wandering for the remainder of the test though as he tried to piece together all the different ways this could go without that.


	21. Chapter 21

For the first time, the five of them weren’t able to compare their test scores before they left Hogwarts, but the last thing most of them wanted to do was even think about the tests anymore. Harry was pretty tightlipped about what happened during the history test, and even Sam didn’t want to talk about that one. He knew that he had been extremely distracted during the test and was worrying over his results. He was worrying over all his results really, but especially history. 

Over the summer, Sam frequently cursed the fact that the OWL results took so long to arrive, but Dean and Gabriel were able to keep him distracted and having fun for the most part. It helped that Sam and Gabriel were sleeping together now in their current bodies, rather than sneaking away every few months. Now that they were both sixteen, they were much more comfortable with the idea. 

Finally, the day arrived. Sam came downstairs and there were three owls sitting on the table, waiting patiently. He yelled for Gabriel and Dean to come down and grabbed his from the bird, accidentally knocking it over in the process. It bit his hand as it took off out the window and he would swear the other two birds were glaring at him, but he put it out of his mind as he ripped open his results just as Dean and Gabriel came into the room and took their results far more sedately. 

Sam Winchester  
Ordinary Wizarding Levels

Arithmancy- O  
Astronomy-O  
Defense- O  
Herbology- O  
History- A  
Magical Beings- O  
Magical Theory- O  
Potions- O  
Runes- O  
Spellcrafting- O  
Warding- EE

Sam’s heart dropped at the history grade. He wasn’t considerably happy about the EE in warding, but at least that was a genuinely difficult subject. History was just his own idiocy in letting himself get distracted. Plus, he would at least be able to continue with warding next year, but he was out of history now. 

Gabriel had been reading over his shoulder, and knew that he needed to say something. “It’s not that big of a deal, Sammy. History isn’t really that important in the long run, and you can learn just as much from the books as from the class. As fast as you read and as well as you retain it, you can probably even learn much quicker that way.”

“That’s not the point,” Sam said trying to keep his emotions out of his voice. “I failed.”

“No you didn’t,” Dean pointed out. “An A is still passing. It’s just like a C in real school.”

“I’ve never gotten a C…or an A!” Sam protested as he got up to storm outside.

Gabriel started to go after him, but Dean grabbed his arm. “Leave it. Just let him cool off,” he advised. Gabriel looked worriedly at the door before sighing and sitting back down. Dean took his results and opened them next. 

Dean Winchester  
Ordinary Wizarding Levels

Arithmancy- EE  
Defense- O  
Divination- O  
Herbology- O  
History- A  
Magical Beings- O  
Magical Theory- EE  
Potions- O  
Runes- EE  
Spellcrafting- EE  
Warding- EE

“Well. Looks like neither of us are in history next year,” Dean said. He could live with that. He’d been considering dropping history anyway, he just hadn’t figured out how to break it to Sam yet. At least now he had an excuse. He, however, had no intention of reading the books like he knew that Sam would. Gabriel said it wasn’t that important so he didn’t really care. 

Gabriel, on the other hand was considering whether Sam would still honor his promise to drop Astronomy now that he had to forcibly drop another class. On one hand, that would him dropping more classes than Dean and he wouldn’t like that a bit, but given that Sam would be doing self-study in Enochian and history and picking up another class, giving them the same number of classes anyway, his plate would still be more than full. He’s meant what he said though. Sam could learn more history by reading the books than he would in class. He’d be surprised if Dean ever even glanced at a history book again though. 

Gabriel went looking for Sam when it got close to lunchtime and brought him a turkey and cheese sandwich. Sam wasn’t hard to find. He was leaning against the tree at Gabriel’s lake, just staring out over the water. “Sam, you’re the smartest human I’ve ever known, and I’ve known a lot. Just the fact that you’re keeping up as well as you are, and even pushing forward in most classes, says that much. Not many could. So you got distracted and tanked one test. The least important test. It’s not a big deal. Really.”

“It is a big deal, Gabriel,” Sam said sadly. “It’s…it’s more than just a test.”

Gabriel knew that on the surface he was saying that it was more important than any other tests, but he was getting the feeling that there was more to it than that. “Why, Sam. Why is it so important to you?” he asked gently. 

“You think I don’t realize what you’re risking here? What you’re sacrificing, and what will happen to you if anyone finds out how much you’ve interfered? You’re risking everything for this, and I just…I feel like I let you down.”

Gabriel sighed and went to kneel in front of Sam, resting his elbows on the hunter’s knees that were pulled tightly against his chest, as Gabriel’s hands brushed Sam’s hair back away from his face, resting on the sides of his head as Sam finally looked at him. “Understand this, Sam, first of all. You. Did. Not. Let. Me. Down. Not even close. You and your brother both have taken this opportunity with both hands and have made me more than proud, but especially you. The only reason that history was even a class was for continuity’s sake and to give you a soft option, and you know all that stuff. You just choked on the test. You’ve worked so hard and done everything asked of you and then some. You haven’t let me down, Sam. You couldn’t. I couldn’t be more proud of you.”

Sam looked at him searchingly for a few minutes as he tried to see the truth in Gabriel’s words, and he must have found it, because he leaned forward and pulled the archangel into a deep kiss, which Gabriel returned whole-heartedly before settling down between Sam’s legs and looking out over the lake with him as he told him about Dean’s results and somehow managed to talk him into still dropping astronomy, with the promise that when all this was over and Lucifer was neutralized, Gabriel would teach Sam everything he missed. Gabriel did him one better and promised to teach him everything he knew if Sam wanted.

Sam was finally calm enough to eat the sandwich Gabriel brought him and just as he started a paper airplane landed on it. Sam rolled his eyes as he opened it and read, ‘headed to Ron’s. Back after dinner.’ 

“I still can’t believe that out of all the different messaging spells your brother knows, he still uses that stupid paper airplane spell he wrote back in first year,” Gabriel said shaking his head with a chuckle. 

“Oh, I can believe it,” Sam said joining Gabriel in laughter. 

It was a much happier Sam that went to bed with Gabriel that night. They had stopped sleeping separately weeks ago, not that Gabriel did much more than lie in Sam’s arms all night enjoying his warmth. He would have to come up with some way to make this happen at school next year, at least some of the time. Sure, he could always just modify some memories so that no one noticed, but that was no fun. Sneaking around was much more amusing. 

They sent off their class selections that night and it was only a few days later when their letters arrived. Dean’s had a surprise in it too. He was quidditch captain. Sam goggled at it for a moment and wondered why it wasn’t Harry, but then he realized that this time around Harry was a prefect. McGonagal probably didn’t want to put too much on him. Still, this would be a massive blow to Ron’s ego. One best friend as a prefect, the other as quidditch captain. He wondered if their friendship would survive it.


	22. Chapter 22

It wasn’t until the five of them, along with the rest of the Weasley’s and Sirius met up for supplies in the alley, that things blew up. Ron threw a tantrum of massive proportions when he found out that Dean got quidditch captain. He said that he had been on the team just as long, and he knew more about plays and strategy than Dean ever could. Dean, of course, took offense at that, but managed to keep his cool, being an adult in mind, mostly at least. He pointed out that he and Ron were basically even on that footing and while they had technically both been on the team since their second year, Dean had been a starter since their third, while Ron didn’t start until fourth. It wasn’t until Ron punched him, that Dean started to crack. “Fine. Since you’re gonna be a little bitch about it, I’ll just take my broom back and you can go back to the crap you were riding,” he said as he stormed off, Sam and Gabriel right behind him. 

Harry was torn for a moment on who he should follow, and the other three didn’t seem to be waiting for him, but when Ron turned on him too and started in on him being a prefect…again, Harry just threw up his arms and rushed after his other friends, Sirius hot on his heels with his own glare at the explosive redhead who was being dragged down the street by the ear by his mother. It was also on this trip that they learned that Sirius wasn’t coming back to teach defense this year. He was remarkably tight-lipped on who would actually be teaching though, only saying that he would be the perfect person for their year, being the top archer in the world and in the top ten with staves which they would be learning in the second term. Sam could sense his distaste for the person despite that and groaned as he remembered who the sixth year defense teacher in the books was and that would fit with Sirius’ attitude. He just hoped he was wrong. 

When he asked Sirius why, he admitted that he didn’t like it very much. It was fun enough, but he wasn’t much for schedules. He only did it because Dumbledore was in a bind and all but begged him. He admitted that he might consider coming back for their seventh year, if the headmaster was stuck again and had no other options, but he would much rather just enjoy life. Sam, not too keen on the idea of Snape as their teacher next year, kept trying to talk him around, but apparently, after twelve years in Azkaban, being stuck in a drafty castle all year wasn’t particularly good for him mentally either. Especially the same castle that held so many memories. Sam was suddenly very sorry he pushed the matter. Thankfully, Sirius was just as eager to change the subject so before the awkward silence could descend he steered them towards quality quidditch supplies. 

Harry and Dean both got the new Firebolt 2 and replaced their padding and gloves. Sam gave in and got a new broom himself, but he went for the new Cleansweep model built more for comfort than speed and Gabriel got one to match. Since he only flew brooms with Sam, it made sense to have one with the same capabilities. He and Gabriel finished quickly and left the others in the shop as they made their way to the bookstore and Sam loaded up, as usual. Gabriel stopped him before he could completely overload himself though. “Relax, Samsquatch. We still have next year when we’ll stock up on everything else you don’t have yet. This isn’t our last chance here.”

Sam chuckled at himself. “Yeah. Okay,” he said sheepishly. 

“In fact,” Gabriel said thoughtfully as he waved down the owner and asked for a catalogue. “Here. We’ll take some time before next summer’s trip going through your library, and marking off everything you already have and then we’ll get a copy of everything else.”

“Yeah. That will be more organized than just grabbing everything in sight,” Sam said looking back over the books in his basket before blushing. “In fact, I think I already have this one.” Gabriel couldn’t hold in his laugh at that as he shook his head and went to put the book back and they headed up to the shelves. They had also been nice enough to grab extra copies of their school books for Dean and Harry, and they managed to get out of there just in time, since they passed the Weasleys on their way in. While most of them greeted the two friendly enough, Ron shot them a withering glare. 

They met Sirius, Dean, and Harry coming out of the quidditch shop and handed over the extra books and after a quick stop to put everything so far in their trunks, they headed to get the rest of their supplies. Sam in particular needed new uniforms for the second time in two years. He was pushing six feet tall now, and was, once again, taller than Gabriel, even as Blaise. 

Once they made it home, Dean turned to Gabriel and asked, “Just one favor before we leave here after seventh year?” he asked hopefully. 

“What’s that?” Gabriel asked lazily. 

“Give us our original bodies and allow one more shopping trip? I don’t know how I’ll live without dragonhide boots for the rest of my life,” Dean said hopefully. He couldn’t believe just how comfortable they were. It felt like his feet were being caressed by a cloud, and they were tougher than anything else in existence too, so that was a definite bonus. 

Gabriel laughed heartily. “Sure thing Deano,” he promised. They would need one last trip back to Diagon after graduation anyway to retrieve the stone from their vault. It wouldn’t be too much of an inconvenience to stop by the shoe store on the way. He would just have to make sure the resurrected dark lord didn’t swing by the alley that day. Ever since he’d been seen in the ministry at the start of the summer he’d been stepping up the attacks. Gabriel still meant to keep his promise about keeping them away from the school. At least while it was in session anyway. The rest of the time was fair game. 

When they boarded the train at the start of their sixth year, Ron still wasn’t speaking to them. Gabriel’s had become the quidditch hub of the group for the last month of summer and even Fred, George, and Ginny showed up to play a few times a week. With the increased traffic in the house, and even the adults coming by regularly, Gabriel’s father made a reappearance and Sam talked Gabriel into making him a little more present this time, at least when the other adults were around. Sam got the statement he had been making, and figured it probably helped him work out some of his anger that way, so didn’t push for more than that. 

Sam spent some time thinking on the obvious changes in Harry’s and Ron’s friendship this time around and figured out that the main difference was Dean. He and Gabriel played a part too, but it was mostly Dean. Before, Harry’d had Ron and Hermoine who had been opposite ends of the spectrum. If he wanted to ditch Ron to hang out with Hermione he’d have to study and if he wanted to ditch Hermione to hang out with Ron, he couldn’t study. Now he had a decent, well rounded friend, and more importantly, someone to show him what true friendship was really like after his time with the Dursleys. He didn’t NEED Ron as much anymore and the redhead had become little more than a hanger-on years ago. Then, adding in Harry’s prefect badge and Dean’s captain badge, and that was just the last straw for his jealousy. 

Dean had caved and decided to let Ron keep the broom he’d given him. It had been offered as a gift rather than a loan after Sam got a new one anyway, so it was only fair. He had also made it clear that Ron would be able to try out for his spot on the team same as always and that he wouldn’t let personal feelings get in the way of choosing the best for the position as long as Ron agreed to leave the attitude off the field. It took a little convincing, but Ron’s desire to go pro finally had him capitulating to the terms and they settled the matter before the train reached the school.


	23. Chapter 23

One thing most students hated about sixth and seventh year was that classes ran later, but then depending on how many classes you were taking you could still end up with the same amount of free time. Since all four houses were together the schedule was a little simpler. 

Sixth Year Schedule:

Monday  
9AM-12Noon- Defense  
1PM-4PM- Magical Theory  
4:30PM-6PM- Divination (Free for Sam and Gabriel)

Tuesday  
9AM-12Noon- Potions  
1PM-4PM- Runes  
4:30PM-6PM- Warding

Wednesday  
9AM-12Noon- History (Free for Sam, Gabriel, and Dean)  
1PM-4PM-Magical Beings  
4:30PM-6PM Divination (Free for Sam and Gabriel)

Thursday  
9AM-12Noon- Herbology  
1PM-4PM- Spellcrafting  
4:30PM-6PM- Warding

Friday  
9AM-12Noon- Arithmancy  
1PM-4PM- Advanced Latin (Free for Dean)  
9PM-Midnight- Astronomy (Free for Sam, Gabriel, and Dean)

All in all they were happy with their schedule this year. Tuesday and Thursday would be difficult days, but Wednesday and Friday would be cake. Especially Wednesday for Sam and Gabriel and Friday for Dean when they only had one class for the whole day. It would make their study group a little more complicated though and they quickly decided to switch to two hours after dinner every day so they could have a set time and just enjoy themselves during their free periods. It didn’t take long for them to wonder why they hadn’t just done that all along, given that it was much easier to have fun outside during the day than inside the castle after dinner. It helped too that curfew for sixth years was pushed back to eleven from ten. 

Once the schedules went out, Dean was quick to set Quidditch tryouts for Friday afternoon, between the last class and dinner. He had checked with the seventh years and no one had a late class on Fridays so it was the best time. He also arranged with Sam, Gabriel and Harry, that on Wednesday’s they would study, if needed only, before lunch to allow for practice after dinner. He booked the pitch for the team Wednesday nights, Friday afternoons, and Sunday mornings. He would have preferred a later time on weekends, but that was the compromise made for him getting Friday afternoons which was a prime slot. Ravenclaw took Monday and Thursday nights and Saturday morning; Hufflepuff Tuesday nights and Saturday afternoon and night; and Slytherin Friday nights and Sunday afternoon and night. 

When tryouts rolled around, Dean was glad to see that Ron was keeping his end of the bargain to keep his attitude off the pitch, much to Sam’s surprise, and so secured his spot on the team once again. The standing rule was that you had to beat the incumbent by a large margin to earn the spot. The thinking was that anyone could have an off day and the extra boost from having worked together before would cover a smaller gap in talent. That wouldn’t be such an issue this year though since he lost both beaters and two chasers. All that was left really were him Harry and Ron. Ginny Weasley easily secured one of the other chaser spots, along with a fourth year girl Demelza Robins. Jimmy Peakes and Richie Coote got the open beater positions as the best of a bad bunch. 

Still, Dean was smart enough not to go too quidditch crazy. This was the year the real work started. Everything was centering around demons this year. In warding, they were learning demon wards that not only worked better, but were more elegant and encompassing than the standard devil’s trap that every hunter worth his salt knows. They were also learning how to modify demon wards to do things like cause pain when they attempted certain things or funnel their power into other places, even powering the wards that were holding them. In Magical Beings, they were studying lower and mid-level demons this first semester and upper level demons and special demons next semester. That would include the four horseman, Knights of Hell, the princes of hell; Azazel, Ramiel, Asmodious, and Dagan; and even touch on the queen of hell, Lilith, despite the fact that she was already dead. 

Everything else seemed to focus in, at least somewhat on demons; how to modify potions and spells to affect demons, the way magical theory relates to demons and how they get their power, even the extra aritmantic calculations that need to be made when taking demons into consideration. All in all, this would definitely help their efforts to slow down, if not stop the apocalypse altogether, though Sam suspected the angel courses next year would be the key to stopping it. He didn’t think Lucifer was really the type to just turn around and give up if all his demons were neutralized. He would fight on alone if necessary. 

Snape, as Sam expected, was a nightmare in defense, though the hunter had to admit that he knew his stuff. Not that it helped Sam much. Between his own lack of skill with archery and Snape’s bias, Sam just barely scraped by with an EE for the first semester. He was a little better with a staff though and even Snape couldn’t get away with giving him less than an O for the second semester, even if it was a low O. Normally, the acerbic potions master didn’t mind Ravenclaws, but Sam’s sin of being friends with Harry Potter was enough to put him at the very bottom of the Ravenclaw consideration. 

Both Sam and Dean found warding starting to come together and make more sense this year and Sam could see the wisdom of learning the foundations that they had and working their way up to demons. They would have been completely lost if they’d just jumped into demon wards. It was that way in many of their classes. They could see where the foundations they’d learned over the last five years made a real difference in understanding this stuff now. Sure they may have been able to use it without all this, but they wouldn’t truly understand it, and if they were going to try and do the impossible, they needed as deep of an understanding as they could get. 

They started meeting up twice a week, Wednesday mornings and Friday nights when others were in classes that neither of them had, to spend some time brainstorming apocalypse stuff. While Sam was reading up on it in his history self-study, Gabriel still had a lot more information on what was coming and how it was supposed to happen and this way Dean got the information without feeling like Sam was trying to lecture on the subject. 

It wasn’t until near the end of the year that Sam had a breakthrough brainstorm. “So from what I can tell, our biggest obstacle in stopping Lucifer, whether that be locking him away,” Gabriel’s choice, “or killing him,” Dean’s choice, “Is going to be in power. We will need something that contains its own infinite power source, correct?”

“Yeah…” Gabriel said wondering where Sam was going with this. 

“What about the rings of the horsemen? I mean, we already have War’s and with the right runes and rituals we can link the other three to it and have a nearly infinite power battery.”

“That’s brilliant!” Gabriel said getting excited. “We just need to find a way to ward you against the influence of the rest of them…well against Pestilence and Famine anyway. There’s no way to ward against Death, but he should be easy enough to convince to help if we can get the rest and a good plan.”

“Wait…what do you mean convince him to help?” Dean asked skeptically. 

“Death isn’t like the others. Death is neutral, and only wants to be left alone to do his job in peace. Luci’s trying to leash him and make him a slave and he won’t like that much. He won’t stick his neck out unless he can be sure we could succeed, but as long as we can convince him we have a chance, he’ll work with us as much as he can. If we can get to him before Luci leashes him it would be easiest, but not the end of the world if we don’t.”

“So, to do list,” Sam redirected the conversation back to where it needed to be. “Find a way to ward against Pestilence and Famine, find the runes and rituals to link the rings. We will have to save how to use them until next year, of course, but this is progress. Finally.”

Sam and Dean started working on the wards, with Gabriel chiming in from time to time while starting preliminary research on the runes and rituals needed for the rings. It ended up taking until the end of the year just to get the warding figured out and they had barely gotten anywhere on linking the rings. They had all summer though, and they would also use that time to work on their amulets too. 

Sam was back to his straight Os and Dean’s grades were much like they had been last year, except that he had brought his warding grade up to an O as well for the first time so he had six Os and four EEs in Magical Theory, Spellcrafting, Runes, and Arithmancy. Harry’s grades were coming up even more too without Ron holding him back and had Os in everything except defense and runes, but even Snape couldn’t justify giving him less than an EE. It was four satisfied people that got on the train headed home for the summer.


	24. Chapter 24

Dean did spend a lot of time playing quidditch that summer, as he usually did, but the rest of the time, he was helping with the amulets and doing research on the runes and rituals to connect the rings. He refused to spend all his time on it though. He pointed out regularly that this was their last summer vacation like…ever…and he did not intend to waste it, so they worked out a compromise. Three hours a day, every day, they worked and the rest of the time they could play. 

The amulets were finished by the time the book lists came out the first of August, and the three of them made their way for the alley. This would be their last big shopping trip so they planned to make a whole day of it and went by themselves. The first thing they did was hit the bookstore with a list of every title they didn’t already have. Gabriel had organized it by subject and they split up to tackle the project. Even with the division of labor it was almost lunchtime before they finished. They decided to make a quick uniform trip before lunch though and get that out of the way while they had a few minutes. 

After lunch they hit the apothecary. Gabriel made them a list of things that were more difficult to get in the US back in the real world and they stocked up on those, using a lot of Dean’s storage space for it. Their next shop was the Magical supplies store where they stocked up on other odds and ends like crystals and divination tools. Most things here they could make themselves and would be more powerful, being attuned to them, if they did, so they didn’t get all the different spell anchors, enchanted items, and ward stones. 

Their last stop was the armorer and weaponry shop. Wearing full dragonhide armor wasn’t practical, but they did get a few tunics and leggings to wear under their clothes that were much thinner than the full armor but still gave them some measure of protection. They also upgraded all their weapons, getting only the best of the best. They each chose the type of sword they were most comfortable with, the katana for Dean and the broadsword for Sam. Gabriel was just going to stick with his archangel blade. Dean also got a bow and arrows, while Sam grabbed some new throwing stars and a two sided hatchet. They both also got a staff that could come in handy from time to time. Both Sam and Dean got stars and arrow tips in different materials, at least some of them pure silver with a few brass and bronze thrown in for some of the rarer creatures they might run across. 

Even with all the expanded space, they didn’t have room to take everything with them to school, so they had to leave a lot of their surplus at home. At least the three trunks should be enough to take everything they needed out of this world. They wouldn’t need the clothes, other than the armor and boots, or all the extra copies of the school books, or the quidditch equipment, though the brooms would be going with them of course. They could also leave behind all the standard equipment that they could now enchant themselves, so they should be good on space without buying more trunks, but if they needed to, they would do so in the last trip after graduation to get the stone and Dean’s precious boots. 

With that they were back on the train for their last year at Hogwarts. Gabriel agreed to use some of his influence to gradually have them grow into their normal selves over the course of the year. They would look older than the eighteen they would be by the end of the year, but it wasn’t like they were exactly old before, so it wouldn’t be too difficult. 

Sirius was back this year for defense after Snape had ended up in Voldemort’s camp over the summer, and this year would primarily be defending against multiple opponents and over the course of the year there would be a few all out melees with the whole class, last one standing would be the winner, with appropriate safeguards in place of course. They would each be able to choose a primary and secondary weapon, and while they were expected to switch it up to keep up their skills with different weapons, they would mostly choose their favorites for the year. The physical conditioning was rounding out well too. Sam and Dean had thought they were in good shape before, but now they were in great shape. They were running ten miles every day and their workouts were shaping and toning their muscles like never before. 

They threw themselves into their angel studies with a passion heretofore unseen, at least in Dean, and they spent more time working and brainstorming ways to end Lucifer’s threat. It was just after Christmas when Sam had an idea. “Gabriel, could you create an alternate dimension to trap him in?” 

“Technically, yes, but I would have to be present to sustain it for any period of time,” Gabriel told him. 

“Right, but what if we were to use the rings to power it. Would that be possible or would it have to be anchored to a living being?”

Gabriel considered the matter for a few minutes before he nodded. “That should be possible. I would have to do the initial setup and set the parameters then we could ‘plug them in’ so to speak to keep it going. We would have to find a way to keep him from leaving though. And keep anyone from breaking him out.”

“Wouldn’t it be easier to find some way to use them to open the cage that’s already there without making a whole new one?” Dean asked. 

“We could try that if you guys want to. It probably would be easier. They would know where he is there though, and there’s always a chance they could still find a way to break him out. If we start fresh, with a whole new dimension, no one would know where to look,” Sam pointed out. 

“Hmm. He has a good point,” Gabriel said thoughtfully. 

“So, to do list. Find a way to use the rings to power the dimension,” Sam started. 

“That should be fairly simple given that we’ve already figured out how to tap into their power. It’s just a matter of directing it,” Gabriel told him. 

“Great. Then we need foolproof warding to keep him there. Something to keep him from sending out messages, leaving the confines of the area, preferably stripping his powers.”

“We’ll also need a way to keep the rings safe and hidden. If they are the anchor to the dimension they could be the key to getting him out too. Also a way to get him there. He would spot a dimensional rift in a second and suspect a trap of some sort,” Gabriel chimed in. 

“Would it be possible to hide it? At least long enough for him to get in?” Dean asked. 

“Hmm. Maybe. We’ll have to look into that. My illusions wouldn’t be strong enough to fool him, but maybe combined with some sort of spell work or warding we might be able to cobble together something that will last long enough,” Gabriel considered. 

“Great, and as for the rings, is there anything that would make them have to be on earth?” Sam asked. 

“What are you thinking? Gabriel asked curiously. 

“Why don’t we just dump them on Pluto and skedaddle. It’s not like it anyone would check there,” Sam said with a shrug. 

“I like the idea, but let’s go one better. Someone might notice something of unusual composition on Pluto. Humanity isn’t long from being able to explore that far. Saturn’s rings are basically just a space based garbage dump with all kinds of debris. We set them in amongst the junk in the middle of the innermost ring,” Gabriel suggested. They might just be able to pull this off. With a good dose of archangel know-how and human ingenuity this could actually work. 

“Brilliant,” Dean said with a grin, unknowing echoing Gabriel’s thoughts. 

“Ok, so the main job this year is work on the warding with the ring power source and hiding the dimensional rift as side projects,” Sam suggested and they all agreed.


	25. Chapter 25

It only took a week to figure out how to use the rings to power the dimension. Gabriel had been right about most of the work being done. It was a simple matter of adding a few anchoring runes once the dimension was set up. The warding, however, was far more intricate. They all felt like they were going in circles. Every time they closed one door, five more opened up and they were getting beyond frustrated, which manifested in them all snapping at each other constantly. It wasn’t until a month before the end of term and their NEWT exams that Sam suddenly had a breakthrough. “Hang on a second. Why are we working with only Enochian runes?” he said thoughtfully. 

“Because only Enochian warding can hold an archangel,” Gabriel said impatiently. 

“Yeah ok. Only they can HOLD him, but blocking his communication might be a different story. I mean, the communication runes keep cancelling out the trapping ones, but if we use a combination of Norse and Celtic runes to block his communications it won’t cancel out the Enochian runes. The only question is whether it can hold,” Sam explained his idea. 

Gabriel’s face lit up as he pulled a notebook over and started scribbling furiously making calculations. “Mhmm…and then we…no…but this…and then that…we can…I got it!” 

“It’ll work?” Dean asked hopefully. 

“It won’t block incoming prayers to him, but he won’t be able to get anything out if we combine the Norse and Celtic runes and add in an Elder Futhark bridge.”

“We didn’t study Futhark runes,” Sam said with a frown. 

“There’s only so much you can cram into seven years Samsquatch. The Norse and Celtic cover most of the same things, but Futhark runes can add an…elegance…that they lack. 

“The big question is whether it’ll undermine other aspects of the warding. Plus, we’ll completely have to redo all the arithmancy and layers to account for the new aspect,” Dean said with a groan. 

“It shouldn’t interfere at all with the Enochian runes and at least we have a base to work from now,” Gabriel reassured him, and just like that their sour moods evaporated and new life was breathed into their project. 

They decided on a two-part ward. An inner ward that was for containment only to keep him from accessing the outer wards which would be what stripped his powers, locked him out of any changes to the dimension and blocked any outgoing communication. They were even able to enchant an aspect of holy fire into the inner ward so that if he even attempted to cross it, he would be incapacitated by the pain until he moved away. 

By the time they finished that, it was only a few days until their NEWT exams and Gabriel called a halt on the Lucifer problem so they could focus on studying for the exams. He pointed out that all they had left to do was to figure out how to hide the dimensional rift until Lucifer was in and it would take a few weeks to get all their preparations done out there plus however long it took to get the last three rings from the horsemen and they still had two weeks between the end of exams and graduation so they had time. 

They all threw themselves into their exams with gusto, still riding the high from their big win, theoretically at least. Even Dean was going all out with his studying. When Sam commented on it, Dean just said, “Hey these are the last tests I’m ever gonna take, and I actually have a chance to ace them. Might as well go all out.”

“Hey, you never know. Gabe might decide someday that we need to go to some kind of magical college,” Sam joked. 

“I’ll gut him like a fish,” Dean said threateningly and Gabriel held his hands up in surrender as he laughed. “You wanna go to magic U, go ahead, but leave me the hell out of it.”

Once the last exam was over, and Sam took the history exam anyway even though he didn’t take the class, they got back to work on their project. If they couldn’t find a way to keep Lucifer from seeing the trap in advance, everything else they did was useless. Unlike most of the other seventh years who were partying the days away in advance of graduation, the three of them holed up in the library every spare moment. Even Dean wasn’t bitching about wanting to join the party with the end so near. 

They took an afternoon off when their NEWT scores arrived ten days later though. They always graded the NEWTs first so that seventh years who were going out for jobs knew where they stood. The three of them and Harry sat down by the lake as they opened their scores. Gabriel only did so for appearances sake. He knew that he aced everything, but he guessed by the grin that broke across Sam’s face that he did too. He knew that Sam would only grin like that if he got a perfect run. He leaned over to confirm his suspicions and rewarded the hunter with a long deep kiss until Dean cleared his throat pointedly and they broke apart. Sam and Dean exchanged scores and Gabriel read over Sam again. 

Sam whistled appreciatively. “Damn Dean. I know you said you were going all out, but shit.” Dean had gotten an EE in warding and the rest were straight Os and even the EE was a high one. Harry had gotten mostly EEs with a handful of Os. They found out later from talk in the common room via Dean that these last two years without the study group hadn’t done Ron any favors. He only got three As and failed everything else and he spent the remainder of the year in a huff. 

Gabriel did fudge the records a bit so that he got passed over for Valedictorian in favor of Sam. He didn’t want or need it, but it would mean the world to Sam. Sam, of course, realized what Gabriel had done, but he didn’t mind. He had won out over all the regular students who hadn’t helped form the universe in the first place so he was still happy about it. What surprised them was that Dean ended up in the top ten of the graduating class. 

As someone who dropped out of high school at sixteen to go on the road with his dad, Dean was really proud of himself and took a lot of satisfaction in getting to walk at graduation, top ten or not. They did all attend the massive party that night after the ceremony that went on until dawn and it was a tired group that trooped down to the train the next morning. Some of the graduates went straight home from the school, skipping the train altogether, Ron among them, but Sam, Dean, Gabriel, and Harry all wanted their last ride on the train. 

It was a bittersweet ride to say the least, as three of them were aware that they would never see Harry again, but they wouldn’t have missed it for the world. When they got off at King’s Cross, Sam and Dean both looked longingly back at the scarlet train. They would miss their time here, but they knew that it was about time to get back to the real world now. 

Once they got back to Gabriel’s place they spent the rest of the evening sorting their belongings between what would stay behind and what would go back with them. Sam’s library was split between his trunk and Gabriel’s and they kept his copies of all the school books since they were still in the best condition. Gabriel had a habit of doodling in his and Dean’s were all scuffed up and bent out of shape from rough handling. Sam also kept all their notebooks with their notes and essays in case they were ever needed. Maybe they would pass them on someday. All the magical odds and ends they’d picked up were also split between the more limited storage space in his and Gabriel’s trunks, leaving Dean’s to hold the notebooks in his miniscule library and their brooms, weapons, and ingredients in his storage compartments. They would still have enough room for a few pairs of dragonhide boots each and the stone, so they wouldn’t need to buy another trunk. 

Sam pulled Gabriel to their room, both back to their normal selves again, and once they were sated, he asked, “So what happens out there. With us, I mean.”

“Oh Samshine. You really think I could give you up now?” Gabriel said nuzzling the hunter’s neck. 

“So…we’ll still be together and all?” Sam asked hopefully. 

“Of course. I love you, Sammy, and that’s not something I say lightly. In fact, once this whole thing with Lucifer is over, assuming we survive, I was hoping you would bond with me,” Gabriel said cheerfully, hiding his nerves over bringing it up at all, much less like this. 

Sam knew full well what bonding meant and wasted no time in grabbing Gabriel for a bruising kiss. “You better believe I’ll bond with you,” he said with a grin. 

The next morning they headed back to the alley one last time. They didn’t have much to do, but they took their time, spending over an hour just at Fortescue’s for ice cream. They, of course, went to the bank to retrieve the stone last, and by the time they got back the sun was starting to set. “Well buckos. Ready to go home?” Gabriel asked. 

“No,” Sam said sadly. “But yes.”


	26. Chapter 26

Sam and Dean appeared back in the Impala driving down the road and Dean nearly swerved off the road in his surprise. He’d forgotten that Gabriel promised to put him back at the exact moment they left and that he’d been driving at the time. Jerk probably thought it would be funny not to remind him too. Sam noticed Cas tense up in the backseat and wondered why. It wasn’t like Dean’s erratic driving had ever bothered him before. “What’s wrong, Cas?” 

“I…thought I sensed Gabriel…for a moment,” Cas said confused as he started to relax, figuring he must have imagined it since they were all in one piece and nothing out of the ordinary had happened. 

Dean laughed loudly. “Man have we got a story to tell you,” he said shaking his head before turning to Sam. “Bobby’s?”

“Bobby’s,” Sam agreed. 

Cas watched them for a few minutes before he said, “You are both acting…different. Has Gabriel done something else?” 

“In a manner of speaking,” Sam said cryptically. It’s nothing bad though. We’ll explain when we get to Bobby’s so we only have to go through it all once. 

Cas nodded and disappeared from the backseat. He had no desire to sit in silence watching them act strangely. He would warn Bobby that they were coming, and that something was off with them and fill him in on everything that he knew. 

Once Cas disappeared, Dean swerved again as Gabriel suddenly appeared in Sam’s lap in the front seat. “Damnit Gabe!” he cursed. “Don’t do that!” 

“Sorry, Deano,” Gabriel said unapologetically. 

“No you’re not,” Dean called him on it. “And you could have warned me that I’d be driving when we got back.”

“You’re right. I’m not. And hey, I warned you back at the very beginning that you’d be coming back to the same moment you left. It’s not my fault if you didn’t take note of what you were doing at the time,” he said with a mischievous grin. 

Sam laughed. “He’s got you there.”

“Whatever, bitch,” Dean grumbled. 

“Jerk,” Sam shot back. Now that he was paying attention, he could see what Cas meant by them acting different. They were much freer and more relaxed than they had been the last time they were in this car almost seven years ago by their reckoning. “So you’re coming with us then?” Sam asked Gabriel curiously. 

“Nah. I’ll skedaddle once we get close to the old man’s house. Just figured I’d join you for the ride. At least for a little while.”

When they pulled up at Bobby’s the hunter was on the porch waiting for them, sawed-off in hand with Cas standing nervously next to him. “Looks like Bobby got warned that we’re ‘different’,” Sam said rolling his eyes as they got out and took the holy water, the silver knife, and the angel blade without complaint. “I promise we’re us,” Sam said after the whole ordeal. 

“Seems like it,” Bobby said suspiciously. “Feather’s says you’re acting strange. You look different too.”

Sam supposed it was the whole weight of the world off their shoulders thing that made them look different. “It’s a long story. Wanna help us with the trunks in the car and we’ll explain?” 

Sam headed over and opened the boot of the car and the three humans each grabbed a trunk and headed inside. “What’s all this?” Bobby asked curiously recognizing some of the runes on the outside, but not all of them. 

“Well…um…how much did Cas fill you in on?” Dean asked wondering where he should start the story. 

“You mean about the trickster being a big bad archangel? Yeah. I got the memo,” Bobby told him. 

“Okay yeah, so basically we got all pissed at him and yelled at him for a while to nut up and help us stop the apocalypse and that put him in a pretty bad mood since he said it couldn’t be stopped, but he decided to give us a chance to find a way, so we…um…he kinda…”

“He sent us to Hogwarts,” Sam interjected seeing that his brother was lost for words. 

“That kinda magic ain’t real idjit.”

“Well no. Not the magic in the books or movies or anything, but there is real magic and he changed the classes and stuff around so we could learn it. We were there for a whole seven years and just graduated a couple days ago by our time. He put us back in the same moment we left though.”

Bobby narrowed his eyes suspiciously at them. He wasn’t sure how much he bought this story, but then Dean pulled a sheet of paper from Bobby’s notebook and used his hand to draw some runes in the air giving a short chant as he did so and the paper folded itself into an airplane and flew right at Cas who was on the other side of the room watching carefully. It floated in front of Cas for a moment until the seraph plucked it out of the air. 

“Seriously Dean. Of all the things you could show him, you pick a spell you wrote way back in first year?” Sam said with an aggrieved sigh. 

“What? It works,” Dean said defensively. 

“So…what’s in the trunks?” Bobby asked not really sure what else to say to that. 

“You’re gonna love this,” Sam said with a grin as he opened his to show dozens of books that quickly had Bobby salivating even before Sam hit the lever that slid those books away and replaced them with a few dozen more. After a few more times of that he stopped and said, “We have over two thousand books on anything you could imagine about the supernatural world.”

“Yeah forget about the musty books,” Dean said rolling his eyes and knowing that Bobby would appreciate the weapons just as much and he opened his first storage compartment that held all their weapons. He tossed Sam his sword and said, “C’mon Sammy. Let’s spar.”

Sam chuckled and shrugged, but before they could do anything else, Bobby said, “Not in the house you idjits!”

“Of course not,” Sam said already moving to follow Dean outside. Bobby and Cas followed them, curious to see how they fought now and they weren’t disappointed. The two hunters were like poetry in motion; Dean with his Katana and Sam with his broadsword. Eventually Dean managed to disarm Sam and pressed the blade of his sword against Sam’s neck and he yielded. 

“You want a go, Cas?” Dean asked brandishing his sword challengingly. 

“Not at this moment. I believe there is more to the story we need to hear first,” Cas said stiffly. 

“Fine. Party Pooper,” Dean said grudgingly sheathing his sword. 

“You learned all that at…Hogwarts?” Bobby stumbled a bit over the word as they headed back inside. 

“I told you Gabe changed the classes around. Defense was physical conditioning and fighting. Martial arts and with all kinds of weapons. The ones we brought back are our best weapons. The bow and arrows are mine and the stars and hatchet are Sammy’s.”

“Nice. So you got a library and some weapons?” Bobby asked wondering if there was more. 

“And a ton of ingredients that are hard to come by around here, some dragonhide armor and boots, a couple brooms to fly on, once we enchant them to keep us invisible while we do, and…” Dean paused for dramatic effect. “The philosopher’s stone.”

“That’s just a myth,” Bobby said dismissively. 

“Gabe assures us that it will work. Well for the making gold part at least. The elixir of immortality would work, but a lot of the ingredients are extinct or ‘distasteful to get’ to use his words, and if he thinks it’s distasteful I don’t think I want to know what it takes,” Sam told him. 

“You didn’t test it?” Bobby asked incredulously. 

“Nah. We kinda…um…stole it…so we kept it hidden until we left,” Dean admitted. 

“So you trust the trickster?” Bobby asked skeptically. 

“Depends on what we’re trusting him about. Do I trust him not to screw with me? No. But about important stuff, yeah,” Dean said with a shrug giving Sam a look that clearly translated as ‘you’re telling him, not me’. 

Sam took a deep breath and dropped the bomb. “See Gabe and I are…kinda…together,” Sam said hesitantly. 

“You and…and the trickster archangel?” Bobby asked trying to wrap his head around the concept. 

“Yeah. He made himself a student to stick close to us and we got close. We’ve been dating for over four years now,” Sam told him. 

“Okay…so…where is he now? I would think he’d stay close,” Bobby asked looking around as if he expected Gabriel to appear at any moment. 

“He’s working on tracking down the rest of the horseman and tagging them for us when we’re ready to take them down,” Dean said. 

“So you did find a way to stop the apocalypse then?” Bobby asked, not seeing any other reason for them to be so chipper. 

“Mostly. Still one more little problem to solve, but we’re getting close,” Sam told him. 

“And you need the horsemen to do it?” 

“Yep. Well we need their rings more specifically,” Bobby gave him an ‘elaborate please’ look. “Well basically, we get all four rings, link them together with a runic matrix to act as a power battery so to speak, then use that to power an alternate dimension that Gabe is gonna create that we are all gonna ward to high heaven so that he can’t possibly get out or be found by anyone. Then we’re gonna hide the rings somewhere they will never be found. Only thing we haven’t figured out yet is how to keep Lucifer from seeing the trap before he springs it. We’re still working on that.”

“You can put up wards to keep the devil in?” Bobby asked incredulously. 

“Oh sure. The whole last year was basically all about angels and archangels. The calculations for the wards were a nightmare and we had to mix a few different types of runes making it even more complicated, but we managed to get all the kinks worked out,” Dean explained. 

“I need a drink,” Bobby said wearily grabbing a bottle of whiskey from the cupboard and Dean nearly snatched the glass that Bobby held out for him. Gabriel never did give him anything stronger than beer at Hogwarts.


	27. Chapter 27

They spent the next few hours filling Bobby in on everything that happened at Hogwarts and the old man was suitably impressed, especially with all the knowledge they’d gained. “Hell, I almost wish the featherhead would have sent me.”

“That could be arranged, old man,” Gabriel said smugly appearing leaning casually against the wall. 

“Um…on second thought…no thanks,” Bobby said nervously eyeing the archangel even as Sam grabbed his hand and pulled him down to the couch next to him and half on top of Dean who rolled his eyes and slid over to make room. “But I still wanna check out your library.”

“Sure thing Bobby,” Sam assured him. “Anytime.” He then turned to Gabriel. “How’d it go?”

“Trackers are on Pestilence and Famine. I’d suggest figuring out the last piece of the puzzle before we start putting things in place just in case Luci gets a heads up from his minions,” Gabriel suggested. 

“Good thinking,” Dean said pulling the main library trunk over and he started handing out books. “Wanna help Bobby?” 

“Not sure how much help I’d be. You obviously know a lot more than I do,” he said gruffly even as he reached for the book Dean was handing him. 

“Knowledge isn’t always the most important thing,” Gabriel told him. “I know a lot more than they do, but it took them to find a way I never saw.” Bobby nodded appreciatively at the archangel as they all hit the books. 

After an hour or so, Dean spoke up, “I can’t help but wonder if we’re going about this the wrong way…or at least starting from the wrong place.”

“How so, Deano?” Gabriel asked. 

“Well you said you could create an illusion but it wouldn’t be strong enough that he couldn’t see through it…” Gabriel nodded so Dean continued. “Maybe we should figure out the difference between what you can do and what we need and then just find something to fill in the gap.”

“That’s…actually…rather brilliant,” Gabriel said surprised. “Sammy you wanna work the equations on how much we need and I’ll work on my capabilities?” Sam nodded at him so he turned to Dean, Bobby, and Cas, “Ok, you guys start looking for ideas on how to make up the difference and we’ll see what we can cobble together once we know what we have to work with.”

Sam and Gabriel bent over their respective notebooks working the arithmantic calculations, and before long Bobby asked, “What about a concealment spell?” 

Before Gabriel could respond, Dean did, “If Gabriel is putting up an illusion a concealment spell would be more likely to conceal the illusion than what’s underneath and they don’t layer well. Spells always attack the weakest point first.”

“Right. Okay,” Bobby said turning back to the book. “So, I’m guessing we’d have the same problem with another illusion spell.” Dean just nodded. 

Cas looked thoughtful for a moment before pulling another notebook towards himself and started working on his own calculations and the room lapsed into silence for a little while before Sam and Gabriel finished their own calculations and put their heads together talking quietly amongst themselves as they worked out the difference they would need. When Gabriel said, “Okay, we got it,” Cas slid his own notebook over, fighting the very human urge to bite his lip nervously. Gabriel looked over it for a minute before tilting his head at the seraph. “But you’re falling. You don’t have this kind of power anymore.”

“We both know there is a way to change that…if…if you would like,” Cas said hesitantly. 

“You would do that?” Gabriel asked shocked. 

“Heaven is already lost to me. If you cast me out too, I would be in no worse situation than I am now,” Cas said firmly. 

“But you know that if you do this, I could conceivably do far worse than cast you out. Would you really trust me that much, with that kind of power over you?” Gabriel asked not really sure how he felt about the offer. On one hand, the fact that one of his brothers could come to trust him again, after everything he’d done, made him feel…warm. Loved even. On the other hand, though, he didn’t really want the responsibility that came with having his own vassal, and the idea that Cassie would so willingly submit to him made him more than a little uncomfortable. 

“If Dean trusts you, then so do I. It is the only way to end this, Gabriel,” Cas said confidently. 

“Wait, what are we talking about here?” Dean asked worriedly. 

“Cassie is falling because he has been cut off from heaven. If I were to take him directly into my service, he would become my servant instead of heaven’s and connect to his power through me,” Gabriel explained. 

“What does that mean, your servant?” Dean asked suspiciously. 

“Exactly what you think it means. I could give him any order at any time and he would have no choice but to follow it or…well…essentially commit suicide,” Gabriel said bluntly. 

“But you wouldn’t…um…abuse it,” Dean said hesitantly. He knew Gabriel pretty well and didn’t think that he would, but he needed to hear the words. 

“Of course not, but the fact remains that I COULD, and if I did there is nothing that anyone could do about it,” Gabriel pointed out. 

“I…I trust you Gabriel. We must end this. This is the best way,” Cas said. “I could lend my power to your illusion and that could give us enough.”

“Before we go doing anything drastic, let’s just make sure the numbers add up,” Gabriel said desperate to put off this decision until he managed to wrap his head around it. As much as they seemed to trust him, he wasn’t a hundred percent certain that he could trust HIMSELF with that kind of power. Gabriel duplicated Cas’ calculations and their own, and handed a set to Sam, took one himself, and handed one to Cas. He wanted to be sure and having three people run the numbers was the best way. 

Gabriel sighed heavily and pushed the paper away. It would give them the extra boost they would need. Gabriel called another book from Sam’s trunk and put off the decision for a while longer as he started crafting one of the most complicated spells he’d ever done. It had to be complicated for a human to be able to pull it off. It took almost an hour before he was done and then he folded in half and handed it to Sam. “Don’t lose that, and be ready to use it if needed,” he said firmly. 

Sam opened it up and looked at it, “What is it?” he asked curiously. He saw enough to know that it would be far easier to ask than to take it apart and figure it out. 

“It will break the bond between Cassie and I with no harm to him,” Gabriel told him. 

“But you said you wouldn’t abuse it,” Dean pointed out. 

“Power corrupts, Deano. I can’t see any way now that I would abuse it, and I don’t want to think I ever would, but I feel better knowing that there is some way to keep me in check if I ever do,” he said seriously. 

“You said it wouldn’t harm Cas, but what about you?” Sam asked pointedly. 

“If it’s needed, it wouldn’t do anything to me that I wouldn’t deserve,” Gabriel said cryptically. 

“Which is?” Sam asked, unwilling to accept that answer. 

Gabriel sighed, “It would split off at least half of my power and use the last half doing it. I would be out of commission for a while replenishing what I had left.”

“But it wouldn’t kill you, or hurt you permanently?” Sam asked. 

“No. Unless you consider the permanent reduction in power,” Gabriel told him. 

“And would it be painful?” Sam asked, ordering Gabriel with his eyes not to dare lie to him. 

He didn’t get a chance to even try because Cas answered first, “Immensely.”

“There’s no other way, Sammy. And remember, if you need it, that means I deserve it,” Gabriel said with a note of finality.

Sam sighed. “Fine, but I don’t like it. At least I know I’ll never have to use it.”

“Don’t get complacent on me,” Gabriel said pointedly. 

Sam smiled softly at him and pulled him close. “I don’t care how little you trust you. I DO trust you. Completely. And I know you better than you think I do. The fact that you even think this spell is necessary is proof enough that I’ll never need it, but I will keep it handy, and I will be ready to use it, if only to ease your mind.”

“Thank you, Sam,” he said pressing a loving kiss to the hunter’s lips before turning to Cas. “Now if you’re sure…I mean, really, really sure…we can do this.”

Cas, like Sam, felt that the fact that Gabriel wrote the spell in the first place was proof enough that he could be trusted, and thus, didn’t hesitate when he said, “I am sure, brother.”

“You fragile little humans might want to close your eyes,” Gabriel said and none of them hesitated, being used enough to that order from angels to know what was coming. 

Cas kneeled in front of Gabriel and the archangel placed a hand on his little brother’s head. “Do you, Castiel, pledge yourself to me and me alone, to attend to my needs and follow my orders above all others save our father?” 

“I do,” Cas said strongly. 

“Then rise, Castiel, and enter my service,” Gabriel said formally and as Cas got to his feet the glow started to fade even as Cas seemed to lose all the weariness that had seeped into his bones the last months before a slight glow came from him as his wings shadowed against the wall. By this time all the hunters had opened their eyes again and Dean was no less impressed this time than he had been the first time he’d seen Castiel’s wings. 

“What are your orders, brother?” Cas asked, knowing that to seal the bond he had to accept an order from Gabriel. 

“You will keep all secrets pertaining to us and our mission here from anyone we don’t all agree allow the knowledge to,” Gabriel said quickly. He had already decided on that order. It would be easy to follow and something Cas would have done anyway. At least, Gabriel hoped he would have done it anyway. 

“I accept your order,” Cas said and the last of the glow faded away along with the shadow of Cas’ wings.


	28. Chapter 28

Now that they had everything worked out, they set out after Pestilence and Famine. Their amulets didn’t work as well as they’d hoped, but they worked well enough. They got enough of a dose of the horsemen’s power to knock them off kilter for a bit. In the case of Pestilence, Castiel was able to heal them quickly enough after they got the ring. Famine was a little more complicated. While the power he had over them ended when his ring was removed, Sam guilt over craving demon blood took a few days and a few long talks with Gabriel to subside. Dean was mostly just unsettled by the fact that he didn’t crave anything. He would have considered that his amulet just worked better than Sam’s if it weren’t for the fact that they were exactly the same. 

Once everyone’s head was back in the game, they started the end run. Gabriel went to talk to Death and took Dean and Sam with him. He knew Death well and he knew that the horsemen would want to meet them personally and would demand it as part of the deal so he was saving them time. He found him in a pizza place in Chicago. “Death. Old friend. How are you?”

“Gabriel. What brings you here? And with the vessels of the apocalypse as well?” Death asked curiously. 

“Well you know Luci’s out and about I assume?” Gabriel asked. Not much slipped by Death after all. 

“Naturally. I am simply attempting to enjoy the last of my freedom before destiny plays its hand.”

“What if it didn’t have to?” Gabriel asked smugly. 

“Speak plainly, Gabriel. I do not enjoy wasting my time.”

“Ok. We need your ring,” he said bluntly. When Death simply raised an eyebrow at him, Gabriel pulled out a notebook and slid it across the table to him. Death opened it slowly and perused the warding scheme, the calculations for the rings power and using them to power the dimension, and even the calculations for the power of the illusion. They all waited with bated breath for the final horseman to speak. 

Finally, Death closed the notebook. “You are asking, not only to borrow my ring, but to keep it from me forever. This is not something I would do lightly, you understand.”

“I do. But you could fashion a new ring,” Gabriel pointed out. 

“Yes. With time and a great deal of effort. And it would never hold the same power as this one,” Death pointed out. “And time, it seems, is something that slips away from all of us. Especially one as busy as myself.”

“Perhaps, but imagine how much more time the apocalypse would take. Isn’t it worth that little bit of time and effort to live free?”

Death looked thoughtful for a moment. “It will take you time to build and ward this dimension you plan,” he said knowingly. Do so and I will find you when you are finished and give you my decision then,” Death said with a note of finality. 

Gabriel nodded and got up, Sam and Dean following his lead and Gabriel transported them to the abandoned warehouse they had selected for this purpose. It was in a town that Gabriel hadn’t worked in before so there was no chance of Lucifer picking up any residual residue of his presence that wouldn’t be hidden by their illusion. As Gabriel began building the dimension around them, Sam and Dean watched on curiously. They knew better than to interrupt Gabriel while he was working, but they got the feeling they were missing something here. 

They waited until he finished and turned to them and Dean was the first to speak. “What is all this?” he asked slightly annoyed. 

“He is still my brother, Dean. Just because I want to keep him away from the world doesn’t mean I want to be cruel about it,” Gabriel told him as they looked around at the comfortable house, the large library, filled only with literary works, nothing that he could potentially use to escape, and the spacious yard with even a pool. 

Sam considered saying something about the matter, but decided it didn’t really matter. No matter what was here or how comfortable it was, Lucifer could still never leave. He would never be able to plague their world again and that was all that really mattered, so he stopped Dean from throwing a fit about the evil archangel not deserving all this comfort. Gabriel shot him a grateful look as the three of them started on the warding. 

It took two days to finish the warding and just as they sat down on the couch in exhaustion, Death appeared before them. “Wait…I thought nothing could get in,” Dean said uncomfortably. 

“Nothing can block Death,” Gabriel told him. 

“Do not fear. I have no desire to release Lucifer from his…imprisonment,” Death said looking thoughtfully around the dimension as if imprisonment wasn’t exactly the right word. Up until that point he had been largely undecided, but the lengths that Gabriel had gone to in order to allow his brother comfort even in his isolation made his final decision for him and he handed over the ring. 

“Thank you,” Gabriel said sincerely as Death nodded and disappeared. He turned back to Sam and Dean. “Well at least we know the warding will work.”

“How so?” Sam asked curiously. 

“Death would have said something if it wouldn’t,” Gabriel pointed out. “His main goal is to keep from being leashed by Lucifer. If this warding wouldn’t hold he wouldn’t have given up his ring for it.”

It didn’t take them long to hook the rings in to power the dimension and Sam and Dean headed outside to wait while Gabriel dropped the rings in their decided on hiding spot. Then came the part of the plan that Gabriel hated with a passion. There was only one thing that would get Lucifer there without question, and there was only one thing they could offer him to entice him into that building. They all knew that there was no other way, but that didn’t mean they had to like it. Gabriel kissed Sam fiercely and said, “We won’t be far,” before he and Dean disappeared. 

Sam took a deep shaky breath before he prayed to Lucifer with his location. “You rang?” Lucifer drawled as he appeared. 

“Yeah. I-I’m sick of fighting. Destiny, fate, all that crap. I’m just tired,” Sam said trying his best to be convincing. 

“So you wish to finally accept your destiny? Accept the greatness that I offer you?” Lucifer said hopefully. 

Sam looked around nervously as they were still standing in the street, and said, “Not out here.” Gabriel had been very clear that he couldn’t outright say yes at any point. He had been practically obsessive over that one subject, in fact. 

As planned, Lucifer was so tempted by the offer that he followed Sam inside without question. The wards had been keyed to activate as soon as Lucifer stepped over the threshold so they sprang to life and Sam quickly jumped out of the inner ward before Lucifer turned on him with rage. The archangel sprung at Sam, but was quickly knocked to the floor in agony by the ward. Sam, satisfied that it was working, headed back out the door and Gabriel and Dean promptly joined him again and Gabriel sealed the doorway to the dimension. It could now only be accessed by an archangel since they were the only beings that could hop dimensions without a door and any archangel that gained entrance would be trapped there with Lucifer. 

Sam opened the door to the warehouse again, just to check and found nothing but an old warehouse. He backed out and grinned. “We did it? Did we really just do it?”

Dean whooped and grabbed both Sam and Gabriel in a group hug. “We did it!” he said excitedly jumping up and down. Even Gabriel couldn’t mask his happiness as he was grinning like a loon too. 

“Ok buckos. I got one more surprise for you. You wanna go get some rest first or see the surprise now?” Gabriel asked. 

“Another surprise?” Sam asked curiously before turning to Dean. “I don’t know about you, but I don’t think I could sleep right now anyway. Dean enthusiastically agreed with him, so Gabriel transported them both to a deserted street. 

“Okay, here’s the surprise. Get through the wards and the place in there is yours,” Gabriel said with a grin.


	29. Chapter 29

“What could we possibly want in there?” Dean asked with his nose scrunched up in distaste. All he could see was a door to the sewers. 

At the same time Sam asked, “Why would we break someone’s wards to steal their hideout?” He could tell by the, admittedly sloppy, wards surrounding the place that someone was hiding something valuable there. 

“Don’t let appearances deceive you Deano. No one has been there for fifty years, but that, kiddos, is the secret storehouse for an extinct society called the Men of Letters. They have a treasure trove of artifacts, ingredients, technomancy, and, though you probably have better, and entire library and father only knows how much research. 

“And you said they’re all gone?” Sam asked perking up hopefully. 

“Yep. They were all wiped out by demons back in the fifties. Sure there are chapters in other countries and all, but they don’t really work together. No one will come looking for any of this and it seems a shame to just leave it sitting here.”

They both then turned their attention to the wards and studied them for a good long while. “There is a blood aspect,” Sam finally said sadly. 

“Which you two can easily pass,” Gabriel told them. “When you were told that you were the vessels due to your bloodlines it didn’t just mean your mother’s descent from one of the original hunter families, the Campbells. It also meant you father’s decent from the founding members of the Men of Letters.”

“Wait…so dad…but he was just a little boy in the fifties,” Dean said confused. 

“Not your father. He wasn’t a part of it yet obviously. Your grandfather though was a member, and his father, and his father, and so on for hundreds of years. Your great grandfather helped build this place and since you carry his blood, you can get in. And you know enough about wards now that you can strengthen them and set them to allow other people in too. Put this place to good use again. What do you say?” 

“Our own batcave? Hell yeah I’m in!” Dean said excitedly as he turned back to the wards with new energy. Sam just shook his head and chuckled at his brother’s enthusiasm, but he couldn’t exactly disagree. 

It only took them an hour to get through and they started looking around. The first thing they realized was that the place was huge. There were about a hundred bedrooms. They were both impressed by the technomancy the men of letters had come up with and Sam in particular wanted to study it more. The artifacts and ingredients were also impressive, but they both turned their nose up at the library. They could see now why the wards were so sloppy. Gabriel reminded them that the men of letters had to figure things out as they went along. They didn’t have an archangel funded school to teach them everything. When they looked at things that way, it was rather impressive, but that wouldn’t stop them from gutting the place and tossing the ‘crap’. They decided to keep all the research and notes though. There was always a chance that their better knowledge could make something more out of it. They also kept everything on the technomancy that they had utilized. Being able to make machines run with magic and even sense magic could be invaluable and that was something that Gabriel hadn’t taught them, mostly because he had never learned it himself. 

Gabriel wouldn’t admit it, but part of his motivation for bringing them here was his hope that they would go more into the research aspect of it and leave the more dangerous hunting to others. Unfortunately, he wouldn’t get his wish. Not completely anyway. 

Sam and Dean wasted no time moving Bobby in and upgrading the phone system so he could run the hotline from here. Bobby took more than a little convincing to leave the salvage yard, but even he couldn’t resist this place. Sam and Dean, did take a little more time for research, but went out on hunts fairly often too. They just didn’t like to sit still for long. 

They were particularly interested in figuring out how to cure vampires and werewolves. They started from the men of letter’s research on the subject and did find quite a bit of useful information. They were able to refine the theories, but it still wasn’t quite there. It ended up taking them nearly five years to figure out how to cure werewolves and they still weren’t sure it would work on purebloods, but it was much better than the cure for only fresh turned werewolves that they figured out in the first year. It was another six years before they managed to find a cure for vampires. 

After the first year, Dean was encouraged to go after Lisa and Ben. He tried to resist for a while, but after all that time of peace at Hogwarts and the fact that they had a secure base now, and hunting was becoming far less dangerous for all involved, he caved and Lisa and Ben moved in two years after they did. 

Sam and Gabriel bonded about a month after the end of Lucifer’s threat, but were in no hurry to start a family. They had forever after all. Dean, on the other hand, didn’t have forever and he and Lisa had two more kids. Another boy and a girl that they named John and Mary. Finding out that he and Sam were named after their grandparents just cemented the idea for him. 

When all three of Dean’s kids decided they wanted to either join the men of letters or be hunters, Dean managed to talk Gabriel into sending them to Hogwarts, but only if the three of them were teachers this time. It was a little different without Harry Potter there, and Gabriel left out the political unrest in the rest of the wizarding world, but they managed. In fact, Lisa and Bobby even joined them as students, though they patently refused to be deaged to eleven. The kids didn’t get that choice, but Hogwarts had two adult students. 

Gabriel decided to teach Runes, Sam taught Magical Theory replacing McGonagal who was now headmistress, and Dean taught Potions. The rest of the teachers stayed the same as when Sam and Dean were there and all three kids and Lisa and Bobby graduated with honors. Gabriel had originally wanted to teach them at home, but the whole time not passing in the real world aspect was what finally convinced him. Bobby in particular was getting rather old so another seven years would make a big difference for him. Unfortunately, he couldn’t deage him in the real world to give him more time, but all things must come to an end someday.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm thinking about adding a one shot or two about them putting the men of letters in their place when they come in and try to take over, first with Henry and then with the British MOL. Not sure when that will happen though.


End file.
